Both sides angry losers
This thing should be over, and this reporter is not just saying this because sending out your laundry at a hotel is the rough equivalent of taking your money and throwing it in a river. This thing should have been over a month ago or more. And yet here we are. For all the talk of this being the plan, the plan wasn’t to drag this thing into January. The NHL plan was to settle in November, the way the NBA did, at 50-50. Bettman, in one of his rare moments of real candour during the lockout, told The Winnipeg Free Press in November that “A sophisticated negotiator would have looked at it and said, ‘Obviously they want a 5050 split.’ If we’re at 57 and they propose 43, they must be telegraphing where they want to end.”
Well, they got to 50-50 eventually, plus US$300million to the players, which means the players have spent nearly half a season’s salaries to save a sixth of a season’s salaries. Maybe they are trying to make it painful, and are willing to spend money to make it painful, to create an institutional memory that will keep this from ever happening again. But that’s been done. It really has.
What are the players fighting for now? Pensions, fine. But the rest is details, in a vastly bigger picture. If you ask either side whether there is a hill left worth dying on, you never get an answer. You might hear apocalyptic talk — “if they want to cancel the season, bring it on,” said one source on one of the sides Friday, and it doesn’t matter which one — but you never get a reason why the apocalypse is worth it. Every week is US$130-million in HockeyRelated Revenue, gone.
But to understand why this is taking so long, take the clause on reporting HRR penalties. The clause was a tiny one, and what it did was change the statute of limitations on penalties for teams that hid HockeyRelated Revenue — like the Wirtzes used to do in Chicago, squirrelling away cash away from the players’ prying eyes. The clause was inserted in an offer back on Dec. 27. T he union alleges it was insufficiently highlighted, and let’s go ahead and assume this was true.
But it was noted and subject to union questions in subsequent meetings, and was not an issue as the two sides exchanged five separate proposals over the course of the week, under a mediator’s supervision.
And then, when Don Fehr decided not to pull the disclaimer trigger at midnight on Wednesday, which would have turned the talks nuclear, suddenly the clause was enough to render Thursday and Friday moot, with no full collective bargaining sessions, with the poor federal mediator schlumping the four blocks between NHL headquarters and the hotel where the players had set up camp. Suddenly it was being used to gin up outrage and frustration for a re-vote on disclaiming interest in the union, which the NHL maintains is a nuclear move that will end the season, even though in the NBA a deal was reached 12 days after the NBAPA did exactly that.
Now, this indicates to the NHL that Fehr is not an honest broker, which in this case is at least reasonably true. But here’s the thing: yes, it’s silly that Fehr used this HRR penalties trifle to rally the players and muck up the strange thanks-for-your-presentation-we’ll-get-back-toyou form of bargaining these two sides have fostered.
But it was also silly for the league to try to change the definition in the first place, since it was so indefensible that it took one meeting to put it back, which wasted another half a day. The league shouldn’t have given the players the pretext to get angry over some non-critical issue, whether or not they felt annoyed by player requests on the issue over the years; the players shouldn’t have waited a week to get it resolved.
It’s the perfect CBA flim-flam: both sides lacking trust, eroding trust, angering each other, and interrupting negotiations over something that no fan on earth cares about, and over something that reasonable people should — and did, as it turned out — settle in no time flat.
And that’s what should be happening here. Instead one side is angry, and the other side is angry, and nobody trusts anybody else, which is why the federal mediator, Scot Beckenbaugh, spent the day performing shuttle diplomacy, and TSN’s Pierre LeBrun reported there was wiggle room on both sides. Of course there is.
Wiggle room should get this done. The owners should give on pensions, since they agreed to it earlier in the process. The players should relent a little on a cap for 2013-14, and the two sides should meet somewhere between US$60-million and US$65-million. One side should bend on CBA length, and one on contract terms limits, and if the players accept shorter contract terms limits, they should get something for it. The Olympics, say. Whatever.
The players have lost, and they can’t win. The owners have won, and lost. But they can all lose a little more, every day.