NHL rejects latest offer, talks break off.
League takes everything off table after Fehr claims deal is possible
New York – The explosion took several strange and electric minutes, almost in slow motion.
After two days of bargaining and several offers and counteroffers, National Hockey League Players’ Association executive director Don Fehr addressed the media and expressed significant optimism, all but saying that the major components of a new collective bargaining agreement with the league had been agreed to, and that while it was not done, they were in terrific shape. Dollars, pension, the big issues. If you were listening, you had to think a season was imminent.
But as Fehr spoke, NHL deputy commissioner Bill Daly called his counterpart Steve Fehr’s cellphone and, finding nobody to answer, left a voice mail informing the players that their offer was not acceptable, that everything that had been agreed to this week was off the table. After Fehr left the room, he decided to come back. The long-fizzling bomb had gone off.
It was a bizarre scene. Players began to give interviews, but were halted after a few minutes to line up again on the podium where they sat or stood, checking their phones. Steve Fehr returned to the room and whispered in the ear of Winnipeg Jets defenceman Ron Hainsey as everyone stood and watched. The room buzzed. Everyone waited.
Don Fehr came back, informed the media that the league had rejected their offer, and said, “It looks like this is not going to be resolved in the immediate future.”
“Previously we didn’t think we were nearly as far apart as the owners did, but I think it’s clear now after the positions the players took today that there doesn’t seem to be much room, certainly not unbridgeable room,” Fehr said.
Within the hour, NHL commissioner Gary Bettman and Daly arrived, and delivered an epic, blistering attack on Fehr. Bettman was openly emotional, and Daly was quietly angry, and the two of them blasted Fehr again and again.
“That reminds me of the last time the players the players said we were close, and we were a billion dollars apart,” said Bettman who has never been this publicly emotional. “I don’t know why he did that ... I find it almost incomprehensible that he did that ... I am disappointed beyond belief that we are where we are tonight, and we’re going to have to take a deep breath and try to regroup.”
“What you’re witnessing is very tough bargaining,” Bettman said. “We kept giving and giving and giving, we made five separate proposals, we kept negotiating against ourselves ... my concern is, and maybe the mistake was, is maybe we should stop negotiating.
“Maybe they thought we didn’t have the resolve, which would be inconsistent with this ownership group.”
Daly said the league had three unbreakable conditions to a deal: a five-year cap on contracts with only five per cent variance between the highest and lowest yearly salaries (seven if you are re-signing with the same team), a 10-year CBA, and no limits on things like escrow, calling them “the hill we will die on.” The players had offered eight-year maximums with 25 per cent variance, and an eight-year CBA with an optout after six, and limits on escrow, and so-called compliance buyouts, which takes money off the cap. Some hill.
It was a farce. The owners have crushed them. They have gotten players to agree to a 50-50 split of revenues from 57-43, plus $300 million US in payments to honour parts of existing contracts which would be rolled back, though $50 million of that is players paying their own pensions. They have pushed the length of the collective bargaining agreement, no matter what, and have put limits on contract lengths. They have held steady on arbitration, and age of unrestricted free agency. It is a rout. All that’s left is finding out how much of a rout it is.
Still, they were not so far apart. The gap was steadily narrowing, and none of this was the kind of thing that should threaten a season. Bettman’s righteous anger kept unspooling, but this felt like NHL and the Proskauer Rose LLP playbook.
This time they are coming for everything they can get. They are pushing the boot down on the PA’s throat, which keeps trying to move under their feet. And they are making it about Fehr, who has stubbornly refused to negotiate off their proposals.
On Wednesday night one owner banged on the door and tried to pull players out of the room, apparently in order to isolate them; Winnipeg defenceman Ron Hainsey said someone from the ownership side told players Wednesday night that bringing Fehr back into the room “could be a dealbreaker.”
One player told Adrian Dater of the Denver Post that Fehr encouraged players not to take the deal offered during owner-player meetings Wednesday night, saying they could get more; if so, then Fehr was basically doing the job the players hired him to do. Clearly both sides are to blame for the breakdown of the process, but only one of them is trying to do anything other than win on what are clearly their own terms. The NHL talks about giving, but the league isn’t the one that’s going to be relatively poorer to start the next CBA.
But Bettman railed away, admitting some franchises were in jeopardy, and said he was worried more would be in jeopardy if the right deal wasn’t made. He downplayed the threat of decertification, or disclaimer of interest in the union, which could open the antitrust Pandora’s box. Moderate owners released statements blasting Fehr, including Toronto’s Larry Tanenbaum, who said, “I question whether the union is interested in making an agreement.” It was laughable.
Now, we see what happens. The players could crack, or the players could simply become angrier and more stubborn, even while faced with defeat, and drag things out. But this entire process has been a slow-ticking bomb, fuelled by Fehr’s intransigence in the face of the NHL’s demands.
The league’s going to win, but not without cost. There will almost certainly be a season; the season isn’t dead. But there’s wreckage everywhere.
“The owners are beside themselves ... They told me the process is over.”
GARY BETTMAN
VANCOUVER – The two-word expletive that means “go forth and multiply” can be delivered in all sorts of ways.
But in the context of a relationship, probably nothing in the world says it more clearly than being dumped by voicemail. Unless it’s by text message.
So when NHL Players Association executive director Donald Fehr walked off the podium after his press conference Thursday in New York — having told the assembled media that, with all the concessions the players’ side had offered in a new proposal, there wasn’t enough difference left in the two sides’ positions to prevent a new collective bargaining agreement — he probably wasn’t expecting to be stopped short of the door by a message left on his brother (and deputy) Steve’s cellphone.
“Unacceptable,” said the message from Gary Bettman’s right-hand man, Bill Daly. “Everything’s off the table.”
As reporters watched, fascinated, Don Fehr returned to the podium. Maybe it dawned on him the message had probably been left while he was still on TV answering reporters’ questions.
He was not happy, but he does a decent job of hiding the exact width and breadth of his displeasure. He has been through these wars before, in baseball.
Bettman’s been through them before, too. Repeatedly.
But when he arrived for his moment in front of the microphones, he was one seething heap of New York lawyer.
He’s a pretty good actor, but I’m not sure, given the colour in his face, that his anger was a put-on. It’s pretty clear what had happened: Talks, which had begun so well on Tuesday, began to deteriorate late Wednesday night when the owners put nearly an extra $100 million into the “make whole” pool. The owners left behind their counter-offer, which Bettman said required a simple “yes or no, not a negotiation session.” Fehr tried to negotiate off it Thursday and the league hit the roof.
And immediately, the conspiracy theories began.
Was all that sudden bonhomie from the owners’ side on Tuesday an elaborate setup?
Were Bettman’s “moderates” — Pittsburgh’s Ron Burkle, Winnipeg’s Mark Chipman, Toronto’s Larry Tanenbaum and Tampa’s Jeff Vinik — really the NHL’s Trojan horse, sent in to catch the players off-guard and get them stampeding toward a resolution? All the while knowing that as soon as Fehr was back in the room, he’d sniff out the ruse and throw up a roadblock, making himself an easy scapegoat for the inevitable recriminations that would follow the next breakdown?
On the other side, could the whack-a-mole game Fehr’s been playing with the union’s ever-moving target be happening because — though he must have known from the start that he was playing a losing hand — he’s worried about what his own legacy might be, if he’s unable to stem the tide of givebacks to the owners?
Could the players, 18 strong, have been so naive as to think there wasn’t something just a little fishy, a little orchestrated, about the sudden thaw from the owners’ side? Were they really surprised when Jeremy Jacobs and Co. revealed the iron fist inside the velvet glove once it got down to specifics?
“The owners are beside themselves,” railed Bettman. “They told me the process is over.”
It does kind of make you wonder what the players are thinking right now.
So Bettman’s opening gambit in the summer was a bloody insult? Everyone could see that. But in the end, he’d come around a little bit. You couldn’t expect to win the negotiation, exactly, because he’s the only dealer in town, unless you had your eye on a Lada, in which case Russia was only about two hard days away by air.
But hang in there and you could maybe walk away with your dignity.
If that’s what the head of NHLPA has been telling his players, Thursday evening’s events must have hit them like a stiff boot to the solar plexus and had them wondering if their hired gun was delusional. Surely, they’re smarter than to think they were — are — going to win this fight.
Fehr put on a pretty good song and dance, making it sound as though it would have to be a really cynical league to reject the players’ offer of a maximum eight-year contract length, an eight-year CBA term with an optional out after six, a nip here, a tuck there — never exactly what the NHL had asked for, but closer.
But what he really was doing was a bit of sleight-of-hand. The sides weren’t close and he knew it. He kept changing the game and as soon as the league would try to put one fire out, another would spring up.
His statement that the players were proposing the eightyear maximum on contracts (the NHL wanted five) appears to have touched a nerve.
The five-year limit, Daly said, is “a hill we will die on.” Anyone who loves the game had better hope he doesn’t mean that. The thing about having burned the house down once, only to build a bigger one at zero cost, is it makes the arsonist think it’s just that simple.