Hockey season not dead — yet
NEW YORK — The explosion took several strange and electric minutes, almost in slow motion.
After two days of bargaining and several offers and counter-offers, 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 deputy 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 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.
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 opt-out 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.
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.
This time they are coming for everything they can get.
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; 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.
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.
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.