Trending Topics is a column that looks at the week in hockey, occasionally according to Twitter. If you're only going to comment to say how stupid Twitter is, why not just go have a good cry for the slow, sad death of your dear internet instead?

A lot of people — myself included — have been focusing a healthy amount of vitriol over this ongoing lockout at a group of owners thought to be central to the work stoppage's existence. Owners like Boston's Jeremy Jacobs, Calgary's Murray Edwards, Minnesota's Craig Leipold, Philadelphia's Ed Snider, Washington's Ted Leonsis, and so forth, have largely been seen as the guys driving the bus because they're the ones that have been at all the meetings.

But a funny thing happened this week. Elliotte Friedman's 30 Thoughts column went up earlier this week and kind of turned those suppositions on their ears. He named Jacobs as the likely Lex Luthor of this lockout (to the surprise of absolutely no one), and also implicated Leonsis as being complicit in heavily pushing the owners' agenda. But it turns out that it's — perhaps logically — not the owners in the markets where teams are actually making money that want the lockout to continue for the betterment of their bottom lines three or five years from now.

Friedman says an educated guess has the owners of the Anaheim Ducks, Columbus Blue Jackets, Dallas Stars, Florida Panthers, New York Islanders, Phoenix Coyotes (which makes sense since you-know-who is calling the shots there), St. Louis Blues and Washington Capitals as the ones who are being the real hardliners in all this.

What do those teams have in common? With a few exceptions in various areas, no one gives a rat's ass about them, they're poorly managed to begin with, they're guilty of giving out cap-circumventing contracts, and they stink.

Let's just go down the list here of the various teams who have Bettman's back through thick and thin because they believe the league as it stands now needs to change, no matter what the ultimate cost this season.

• Anaheim finished 25th in the league last season and 17th in 2009-10, and would likely have done the same in 2010-11 if not for an absurd hot streak by Corey Perry (who's on a frontloaded deal). The Ducks are a team that has been 24th or lower in league attendance in each of the last three seasons despite being within $5 million of the cap in all of them. They're a team that's managed alarmingly poorly, almost running a 40-goal scorer out of town on many occasions and taking an "it'll take care of itself" attitude toward its defense. Their GM has managed what was just a few years ago a very good team pretty much into the ground and seems unlikely to re-sign both or indeed either of Ryan Getzlaf or Corey Perry, and again, might still trade Bobby Ryan for scrap. "So please," says Ducks owner Henry Samulei, "protect Bob Murray from himself."

• The Blue Jackets are of course the laughingstock of the NHL, despite the acquisition of John Davidson, a poorly run mess who would have gone through at least two GMs in the last five years if their owners cared at all about accountability. How many years have they been in the league without winning a single playoff game again? The good news is they offloaded Rick Nash's terrible deal, but oh wait they got not-much back and made it a protracted, embarrassing drama. Everyone wants out for a reason, and it's not just that they've been higher than 20th in league attendance twice since the last lockout. The only person Columbus should be interested in locking out is Scott Howson (and maybe the penis cannon) from the city limits, but by all means, Gary, John McConnell needs you to keep him from giving James Wisniewski another $33 million over six more years, because he can't help himself. And by the way, they deserve to host the NHL All-Star game at least as much as Traktor Chelyabinsk does.

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