Actual ‘negotiating’ is leading to good vibe
NEW YORK — For all the potentially apocalyptic threats that have been floated out into the air — a refusal by NHL players to even negotiate a salary cap, a refusal by owners to give a dollar more, and to a far lesser extent decertification, all various forms of dynamite strapped to the bridge footings of hockey — the latest National Hockey League lockout was always destined for a fairly simple choice.
There was always going to be a point when owners and the players would have to make a choice between playing the season or blowing it up. Simple. At some point you run out of time to cram in a shortened, pressure-packed, how-it-probably-should-be schedule, and delivering gloomy threats doesn’t really get you anything but another wasted day. The NHL, as December has arrived, is approaching that point.
And on Tuesday and Wednesday in New York, with the fragile tendrils of hope suddenly in evidence, it felt like there was a chance to make that choice, one way or the other. On Wednesday the two sides met again without NHL commissioner Gary Bettman or NHLPA executive director Don Fehr, after eight hours of what were universally described as positive talks on Tuesday.
Offers were exchanged and countered. Terms were discussed and elasticized. Few details leaked out — it was reported the NHL wanted to push a new collective bargaining agreement to 10 years, at least partly to mitigate the impact of any makewhole provisions to honour existing contracts.
But it was bargaining. The players presented an offer in the early afternoon; the owners countered just after 4 p.m., and left after 15 minutes with a genial air about them to let the players mull it over. The owners’ negotiating committee of the day — Larry Tanenbaum of Toronto, Boston’s Jeremy Jacobs, Tampa’s Jeff Vinik, Winnipeg’s Mark Chipman, Calgary’s Murray Edwards, and Pittsburgh’s Ron Burkle, the supposed saviour of Tuesday’s talks — all milled around for a few moments as Fehr popped back in, a smile on his face. The assembled cameramen and photographers shot B-roll film and took pictures and reporters tried to decipher body language; it was like being a critic at a play, without being able to hear. In the room, the owners come and go, talking of how much they will owe.
The point, though, is that this is how real negotiations are conducted, and that alone was progress. All the posturing and spin and theatre that has taken place during this lockout — the league offering a hammer to begin, the union with three back-of-a-cocktail-napkin offers, the league storming out after 10 minutes, the duelling leaks and press conferences, full of deeply rehearsed regret — was replaced on Tuesday by the silence of work.
Tuesday night, deputy commissioner Bill Daly and NHLPA deputy Steve Fehr stood side-by-side and addressed the media. This is what it looks like when you’re trying to make a deal.
So yes, on Wednesday, reports flew back and forth all day: coaches were telling players to be ready, then the NHL was telling coaches not to call the players; league governors had not been informed about Tuesday’s progress, or they had been informed about Tuesday’s progress.
And through all of it, the same undercurrent was present: This was a chance. While everybody cautioned that there was still a lot of work to do, this was an opportunity to actually put together the component pieces of the deal that’s been lying there in the middle all this time. It was a chance to actually compromise, and make a deal.
Really, that chance has always been in the cards, barring an act of insanity. On Tuesday, Pittsburgh’s Sidney Crosby and Burkle, along with the mystical presence of Mario Lemieux, were said to be instrumental in brokering a better, more progress-friendly tone. When Alexander Ovechkin was quoted Wednesday as telling a Russian outlet that there was “no progress,” while essentially admitting that he had no clue what was actually occurring, it was so funny that it felt almost scripted. The Crosby-Ovechkin rivalry lives!
Of course, the whole thing feels scripted, at times. It’s easy to imagine this as just another section of the Proskauer Rose playbook, since the worker-crushing law firm has mounted this production before, in the NFL and the NBA last year. This breakthrough in negotiations occurred after Bettman suggested the meeting without himself and Fehr, and wouldn’t Burkle be a fine choice as the good cop to Jacobs’ bad cop? The NBA signed its new deal on Dec. 8 of last year, after some frantic negotiating in late November; you could be forgiven for thinking that actually making a deal was just the pre-planned scenario the league was driven to after 80 days of being frustrated by Fehr’s stubborn refusal to bargain on their terms, or be vilified in the public eye.
But then, these two sides have been steadily creeping closer in terms of actual dollars the whole time, and were only $182-million US apart based on the last proposal on Nov. 22, according to Fehr. All they needed was a bridge across the gap without incurring any explosions.
So this is the chance. If you squint and hope you could imagine a different sort of explosion is coming, a hockey Big Bang, when all of a sudden instead of make-whole provisions and HRR and lawyers we will be talking about goaltending and line combinations and a season where just about every team will sprint flatout for 50 or 60 games, and it will be like watching roller derby, even more than usual. (When asked if Vegas should favour the over for groin pulls, one player said, “That’s a safe bet.”)
But all this is just the result of the one real pressure point in this entire lockout, where both sides peer over the cliff and decide that hey, maybe it’s best not to fall.
There’s a chance here, and what a shame it would if anybody loses their balance, and topples the whole damned thing.