New deal between NHL, players union still far off
NHLPA boss Fehr says there’s no rush to update collective bargaining agreement
Wearing jeans and a white dress shirt with the top button undone, one might have assumed it was “casual Friday” at the NHLPA’s offices when Don Fehr sat down last week for a one-on-one interview.
But as the head of the players’ union explained, it’s been like this every day.
Well, that’s about to change. We’re still a full year away before the NHL Players’ Association and the NHL have to decide on whether they intend on reopening the collective bargaining agreement, which expires in September 2020. And we’re two years away from talk of another lockout. But you can be sure the clock is ticking.
Considering how contentious the last two negotiations were, it would probably cause a lot of hockey fans to breathe easier knowing the two sides had begun negotiations, or were even talking. But Fehr is not putting on his power suit and heading into a boardroom with NHL commissioner Gary Bettman just yet.
As the union head told Postmedia News, there’s a lot of time between now and the next deadline. And he plans on using every single second of it to his and the players’ advantage.
“The doomsday would be two years away,” Fehr said. “Even if notice is given in September 2019, the contract doesn’t expire until September 2020. That’s a fairly long time into the future and I’m 70, so a lot can happen between now and then.
“That doesn’t really trouble me. And collective bargaining — like a lot of things — sometimes you need circumstances to prod the parties to begin the process and ease it.”
For most fans, the terms “CBA” and “expire” automatically bring up the threat of another lockout. After all, it’s something they’ve unfortunately become accustomed to. The NHL lost a full season to a work stoppage in 2004-05 and shut its doors again in 2012-13, shortening the schedule to just 48 games.
No one wants that to happen again. Not the owners, who are reaping the momentum of a team in Vegas and potentially another one in Seattle. Not the players, several of whom are averaging US$10 million or more per season. And certainly not the fans, who are witness to perhaps the fastest and most skilled product ever.
At the same time, Fehr is not about to make the first move in what could be a long and complicated chess match. Negotiations are all about deadlines and pressure points.
Right now, there’s no urgency. That could change in the next two years, for instance, when the league decides to grant a 32nd franchise to Seattle or the topic of participation in the 2022 Olympics comes up.
“We talk internally about the CBA all the time,” NHL deputy commissioner Bill Daly told Postmedia News. “I think the nature of our process is we’re ready to engage whenever they’re ready to engage. But you need two parties ready to engage.”
Fehr said: “There’s some generalized view that the earlier you start the better off you are. That’s a reasonable view and sometimes it’s true.
“But if you go look at a house with your wife and you’re not sure you want to move, and the house you’re looking at is owned by someone who isn’t sure he and she want to sell, it’s going to be a really tough negotiation at that point to get there. But if someone has some urgency, or better yet they both do, it makes the end result a lot more likely. We’ll just have to see how it plays out over time.”
Right now, it seems as though the owners want to extend the CBA more than the players do.
“I read that the owners are basically happy with it,” Fehr said of the CBA. “But obviously, the players made significant concessions last time and much bigger concessions the time before. And escrow has not gone away, contrary to what was thought and predicted at the time. There are some really frayed nerves over the Olympics and some other things.”
The two big issues for the players are Olympic participation and escrow payments. Each is, to borrow a phrase from Daly, a hill worth dying on.
While the Olympics affect only a small percentage of the union, the stars of the league inherently have the biggest voice in the matter. From Connor McDavid and Patrick Kane to Alex Ovechkin and Erik Karlsson, no one was happy to have missed playing in South Korea.
At the same time, the NHLPA was not about to allow the Olympics to be used as a bargaining chip to extend the CBA. Until it gets resolved, you can kiss goodbye any hopes of seeing another World Cup of Hockey.
“Is it an important issue for the players? Sure,” Fehr said. “It would be nice if everything worked out at once. I don’t mean this to sound crass, but you don’t actually want to make your marketing, promotion and business development decisions as secondary to a labour relations calendar. That’s sort of backwards.”
As for those much-loathed escrow payments, which ultimately helped end the last lockout, the players are obviously unhappy with money taken off their paycheques to ensure the league receives at least 50 per cent of the season’s total revenue. But the alternative — decreasing the cap limit — means less money for teams to spend on player salaries, thus fewer jobs for free agents.
It’s not a perfect world. Then again, nothing really is with a hard salary cap. It’s just a matter of what the players and the owners are willing to live with. And whether it beats the alternative.
The answer won’t be known for another year, or more.
“If you asked anybody in any of those discussions from either side two years before the deadline if you really want to go through a strike or a lockout again, everybody is going to say no,” said Fehr.
“All the bad memories come flooding back and all the rest of it. But that’s not the choice you make. The decision you make is whether the agreement on the table is preferable to a shutdown. You can’t make that decision now.”