Losing teams from the current 30 team league seems like a whole other subject to me. There you are discussing the player pool depth, and that has nothing to do with the subject of this thread.
The longer the strike goes, the better for hockey fans.
Something has to change in the way the league and players were running the league. It's a joint partnership at this point with the CBA's, and if teams can't survive, they have to decide whether or not they wish to lose teams and lose jobs, or keep the existing market. That's for them to determine, and I think you can make arguements for each side.
I'd like to think there are some creative solutions to this whole mess, and I've even offered two of them with my CBA Proposal with a Developmental Exemption to a cap where only players not developed by that team could towards a cap, or the CBA Proposal of splitting the league into two groups, one with a cap and one with a salary floor -- let the spenders compete against each other, and let the economically unstable compete -- winners go to the Cup finals.
There are tons of other ideas as well, and in the meantime they aren't even talking. Seems like this should be at least a part-time job for both of them, and they should be spending 20+ hours a week in discussions and negotiations.
I think the tide will turn this winter when many of the players contracts in Europe expire and when those league cease to play for their season. Then you will see all of those higher calibre NHL players out of work once again, and they won't want to miss too many paychecks at that point. Much like the last lockout, no one even wakes up until the end of December.
As a side note, the NHL is not broken, but it needs to be fixed at the same time. If it was broken, it wouldn't have been running in the first place last season. They need to change the emphasis from can't lose games to must win games. The psychology from management and the coaches is different in the regular season than the playoffs because the playoffs have a finish, there is a winner and a loser. The regular season has that gray area where it ties. So make both teams a loser if it's a tie, scrap the point system in the standings and go with a wins-based standings instead. If you don't win the game, you lose the game. That is not true right now.