Saturday’s the day that Minnesota cricket’s champions will be decided. (Champions, plural, because there are three divisions – named in grand English soccer style as the Premier division, Division 1, and Division 2).

I wrote a fairly short preview of the matches for CricketSota.

*Note: These links appeared first at RandBall, your home for 20-mile runs. *

The NHL lockout begins today, and by all accounts, it looks like it’s going to be a long one. Bryan Reynolds at SB Nation Minnesota says NHL fans need to find a new hobby, because it’ll be awhile, and poor Michael Russo sounds positively despondent at his blog. (We may need to all pitch in and buy Russo a puppy or something, because the guy just sounds depressed.)

With this in mind, I was going to try to go big picture and have a little fun with it, and give you a list of other things that you, as an NHL fan and a Wild fan, can occupy yourself with this winter. I got about three sentences into that column before I realized something: Wild fans aren’t exactly at a loss around here, nor are they suddenly going to be looking at yawning stretches of nothing on the sports calendar.

It would be stupid to write that Wild fans won’t miss the team; there was genuine excitement about the team this year. But there’s probably even more excitement about the Timberwolves’ possibilities this winter, or the Gopher basketball team’s. Not a basketball fan? No problem; Gopher hockey’s always been there to fill our hockey needs, and they’re looking for a return to the Frozen Four. We can check in with Houston, with Mikael Granlund and the rest of the Wild’s prospects in the AHL. And on your doorstep, pretty much wherever you are in Wild territory, there’s the best prep hockey league in America, and those kids are playing the next town over tomorrow night, and the junior class is selling hot dogs at the concessions stand.

We’re going to be fine, fellow Wild fans. We’ll hardly even notice they aren’t playing. It’s become clear that Craig Leipold and Gary Bettman and the rest of their cronies in the owners’ boxes don’t care about us, but this winter, I’m pretty sure we’ll be able to send them a message that should, but clearly doesn’t, concern them: fellas, when you’re not around, we don’t care about you, either.

*On with the links:

*We’ll start by continuing the hockey theme, with Down Goes Brown making jokes about NHL ’13, along with an excerpt from a Bettman quasi-biography on Deadspin.

*For the football fan who’s X and O inclined, here’s a great Grantland breakdown of how the Redskins are helping Robert Griffin III succeed.

*Anyone who’s ever read an edition of the Best American Sports Writing series will want to check out Kevin Koczwara visiting editor Glenn Stout for The Classical.

*Also from The Classical: Matthew Callan writes about umpire Ron Luciano, who umpired in the majors and wrote a great sports book and did television, but ended up dying by his own hand, in seclusion and living with relatives in his howmetown.

*And finally: A’s pitcher Brandon McCarthy is still recovering from the liner that fractured his skull, but his sense of humor is in mid-season form.

Twins AAA catcher Rene Rivera wasn’t happy that he wasn’t called up to the major leagues; apparently the team had made some promises that they didn’t keep. At Twinkie Town, we look at a few others that the team might have made this year that also weren’t kept.

In the interest of bringing the number of sports I write about regularly ever closer to double digits, I’ve started writing a blog for the local cricket league’s website. The Minnesota Cricket Association is probably best compared to town-team baseball in Minnesota; it’s decidedly amateur, but at the same time, much more serious than rec-league softball.

I’ve written a few posts now – I’ll put up more as I go along – but for now, here’s my preview of this weekend’s league semifinals.

I wrote a column about Joe Mauer for SB Nation Minnesota, specifically about why the Twins’ best player seems to make some Twins fans so unbelievably angry.

So far, I’m only in one ongoing discussion about it; more anger may build up throughout the day.

Covered what could be my last Stars game of the year on Tuesday night – the full game story’s here. The Stars are in the playoffs after a 4-0 in, but could well end up without a home game, so it could be the last one.

I also put together some Twins news and notes for their series with Kansas City. They got killed 9-1, so not so good there.

It is quite rare that I can write a post that pokes fun at Tsuyoshi Nishioka and Tommy Herr at the same time, but today at Twinkie Town, I managed it.

I also got shots at Otis Nixon and Ryan Mills in there. I feel kind of proud of that.

I do quite like the SB Nation StoryStream system. Rather than waiting for the game to be over to write one long report, I can write 5-6 short posts to cover a game – a preview, a lineup, half-time and full-time reports, and quotes from the coach. It’s different than the traditional 600-words-on-deadline way of covering a game, but I don’t think it’s worse.

Here’s the effort for Saturday, as the Stars drew 1-1 yet again, with Edmonton (yet again).

This post appeared first at RandBall, your home for, uh, homes for stuff.

We’re one week away from the September 15th deadline in the NHL collective bargaining negotiations, after which it seems certain that the NHL owners will band together and lock out the players, stopping the hockey season from beginning on time. If nothing else, the sheer gall of the owners is impressive; seven seasons after canceling an entire year to break the players’ union and get a much more owner-friendly CBA, the men in the expensive suites are back at it again, demanding that the union take around a 20% cut in the share of league revenues that the players receive.

If this seems ridiculous, it’s only because it is. Had the players asked for a 20% increase in their share of league revenues, three owners would have died from laughing so hard that their hearts exploded. Nevertheless, we’re on the brink of yet another work stoppage – the third in the major pro sports in two years, on the heels of the 2011 NFL and NBA lockouts – with seemingly no way out.

What’s striking to me is that the era of real differences between players and owners in pro sports seem to be more or less over. MLB players spent much of the 1970s and 1980s attempting to get owners to stop treating them like chattel, and eventually baseball owners managed to stop colluding and trying to roll back labor relations to the 1930s. That was an era of real differences. The 1990s were filled with disputes about salary caps and luxury taxes, as owners tried to put a cap on spending and players tried to block these constraints. Those were real differences. But all three lockouts in the past 12 months – assuming the NHL’s does indeed come to fruition – are based on one thing: the owners want more money and they’re willing to blow up everything to get it.

On the one hand, I suppose this is a good thing. All four leagues seem to understand that on some level, players and owners are partners, and in order for the leagues to sustain themselves, it’s important for both sides to be guaranteed something. This is an improvement from the old days, and at some level it means that all these work stoppages are about is arguments over math.

On the other hand, the NBA and NFL players both just agreed to give back revenues from previous agreements, getting it down to around a 50-50 split between players and owners. The NHL will probably land in some kind of similar territory. And I guarantee you this: when those fresh agreements expire, you can count on one thing: the owners will trot out wildly false financial figures that claim they’re losing money. They will plead poverty. And then they will demand that the players take 40-45% of revenue. And so on down the rabbit hole.

*On with the links – and it’s somewhat crowded, given I missed last week:

*If the Wild don’t play this fall, we’ll just have to spend more time watching the Wolves. Near the end of the Olympics, Grantland broke down the NBA potential of new Timberwolves guard Alexey Shved.

*Seems like we’re all talking about Anthony Slama and his continued exile from the big leagues. Twinkie Town points out that he’s still getting strikeouts – but getting them in different ways.

*I loved this article from The Classical about 16-inch softball leagues in Chicago.

*Here’s Will Leitch writing about the new basketball arena in Brooklyn, and how it might affect both the Nets and the neighborhood.

*The Economist looked at the effect of grueling travel on sports teams, a post that includes not only data on cross-country American teams, but on the league with probably the worst road trips in the world: Super Rugby, which plays on three different continents on opposite sides of the Southern Hemisphere.

*The Classical writes about 22-year-old tennis player Michael McClune, who is enduring one of the hard transitions in sports: from junior star to grind-it-out-pro who has to fight his way up the rankings.

*And finally: it’s college football Saturday, so go read some Spencer Hall to get yourself in the mood.

Labor Day weekend caused a break in the writing action, so to speak, though I did write a quick post about the Stars game over the weekend, and another one on Wednesday about the NASL’s decision to make soccer in Minnesota even less viable next year.

Suddenly I am writing a lot about local soccer and a lot about local cricket and frankly I’m having an awfully good time.