NHL, union on collision course
OTTAWA / Gary Bettman had wrapped up his post-podium chat with reporters and vanished, but his deputy commissioner Bill Daly was still talking about the league’s various slow-burning fires.
There’s Phoenix, which continues to smoulder toward a conclusion, and New Jersey, where Daly admitted the National Hockey League has advanced the Devils a share of future league revenues to keep the franchise operating — when a white-haired man appeared at the other end of the room and was bathed in the soothing light of television cameras.
It was not an adversar ial appearance, or even a declaration of anything much, but Don Fehr was here, ready for equal time.
Fehr, of course, is the man who will sit down across the table from the NHL’S commissioner when it comes time to negotiate a new collective bargaining agreement, and who is expected to meet informally with Bettman here this weekend. Neither he nor Bettman would commit to much, since the dance won’t really start until after the season at the earliest, and the CBA itself does not expire until Sept. 15. The two men will wrestle, but not until later.
“I have known Gary a long time,” said Fehr, who ran Major League Baseball’s player union from 1986 to 2009. “I knew him all the way back when I was Marvin Miller’s general counsel, and he was brand new, working for David Stern. It’s been a long time. We’ve never been across the table together. All I can say is his reputation for being smart is, as far as I can tell, exactly right.”
So too is Fehr, but he dismisses the notion that this will be a clash of intellects and egos. He acknowledges he has been playing catch-up since being named as executive director of the NHLPA in December 2010, though. He won’t say he’s caught all the way up, just yet.
We are beginning this journey, like it or not. The union wants more financial information, but says that’s normal. The league says it has been and will be transparent, and we’ll see. But assuming the league wants to follow the example set by the NBA and NFL — where players went from 57 per cent to about 50 per cent and 53 per cent to 48 per cent of league revenues, respectively — there is a collision course beginning to form.
When this begins, everything will be on the table. Realignment, which the players rejected earlier this year; supplemental discipline, which Fehr noted has no “due process,” which he described as something which creates “philosophical issues”; relocation, which is tied to revenues, which make the whole NHL go around.
Hockey is on the table in every way. And at some point these two men will sit down and they will bring with them everything they know.
And the game, for good or otherwise, will be in the middle.