Matt Cullen fears that the "window is very short" before the CBA battle gets "really ugly," but hasn't lost hope. "We're now on a slippery road," Cullen said, who also went through the 2004-05 lockout. "It's a scary thing. Of course, everybody wants to get the best deal. Everybody's frustrated and dying for this thing to work out, but once the full season is off the table, it's understanding all of a sudden everything goes south. After experiencing it last time, it's not fun once you start seeing more bickering and more getting entrenched in your ideas that, 'We're right. No, we're right,' sort of thing. Last time we saw that, and it went the wrong way fast." That being said, Cullen is still hopeful. He knows what the rhetoric is coming from both sides and doesn't care about it. In his view, the two sides are "extremely close" at this point and it would "absolute shame to lose more hockey when we're so close."