*Official* CBA Negotiations and Lockout Thread

[Provost]

... Everyones salary gets rolled back 15% which out of your 60 million brings it to 51 million. Next year malhotra, and raymond will be gone thats another 4.5 million.

[G-52]

I havnt read the latest proposal, but im pretty sure it is still including that "make whole" plan which is what pays for the rollback in salary, the money comes out of the owners 50%

[poetica]

That is very likely what is going to happen, the NHL will lie to ignorant fans and swear there's no rollback in salaries even when owners know they'll be paying less than promised for years thanks to their lowered cap and escrow even as they claim to have made players "whole."

[Provost]

I havnt read the latest proposal, but im pretty sure it is still including that "make whole" plan which is what pays for the rollback in salary, the money comes out of the owners 50%

[G-52]

It may seem like semantics (because it is... just spin on the part of the NHL). There is no "rollback" in any proposal from either side and hasn't been for months.

That means that each Sedin keeps their salary at $6.1 million, that is unlike last CBA when each player rolled back their actual contracts 24%.

So Sedin gets his full cheques, but a big chunk gets held back in escrow. It is just a way to have some money kept in trust because they really just estimate what the salary cap should be and at the end of the year have to calculate what was exactly owed to the players based on their 57%. The calculation was pretty close each year, some years the players even got more money than what they put in escrow.

Under a new CBA with no "rollback"... the players won't get any money back in escrow. There are estimates that say it might be well over 25% for the next couple of years. the "Make Whole" money is then applied to make up some of that loss.

The whole argument about whether to keep the cap at $60 or $67 million next season doesn't really matter as it doesn't add any dollars to the players.

[Ossi Vaananen]

... Everyones salary gets rolled back 15% which out of your 60 million brings it to 51 million. Next year malhotra, and raymond will be gone thats another 4.5 million.

[Ossi Vaananen]

While I applaud your effort, I don't think you are understanding the agreement properly. In order for the players share of 57% to drop to 50% there is an innate rollback that has and always will be part of this agreement. The entire point of "make whole" is to pay the players the money they are going to lose via this rollback. The money comes from the owners 50% of the share, and includes an escrow of 3% should the revenues not land in their projected range.

[DeNiro]

While I applaud your effort, I don't think you are understanding the agreement properly. In order for the players share of 57% to drop to 50% there is an innate rollback that has and always will be part of this agreement. The entire point of "make whole" is to pay the players the money they are going to lose via this rollback. The money comes from the owners 50% of the share, and includes an escrow of 3% should the revenues not land in their projected range.

[G-52]

Once again you're off, and provost was right in calling it semantics. See highlights here: http://www.tsn.ca/nhl/story/?id=412383

There is no salary roll back, teams will have to be in compliance with the cap for 2013/14, which means amnesty buyouts and players being waived. Ultimately paid veterans lose their NHL jobs to cheap rookies (a point which has been illustrated by a number of posters including myself).

[Ossi Vaananen]

These are #2 and #3 bullet points in the new agreement.. Im not sure why you choose to ignore them.

• $300 million in “Make-Whole” payments (outside the system) to compensate Players

for the reduced value of Player contracts in the early years of the new CBA.

• No contractual “roll backs” of Player Salaries.

300 million in make whole payments for the reduced value of player contracts - This indicates a rollback

No contractual "rollbacks" of player SALARIES - This means that the players SALARY will not get rolled back, but his contract will still have decreased value..

As I said its pretty plain sight to see, i'm not sure why you people are even arguing it especially due to how damn well absurd the proposition would be.

Furthermore this is simply HIGHLIGHTS from a 300 page agreement that is written by lawyers. You, I'm guessing are NOT a lawyer. You are not qualified to read and interpret an agreement of this magnitude. Coming from someone who has taken law, and passed the BAR, I can tell you this would be quite the work load even for a seasoned lawyer to interpret.

[GLASSJAW]

Furthermore this is simply HIGHLIGHTS from a 300 page agreement that is written by lawyers. You, I'm guessing are NOT a lawyer. You are not qualified to read and interpret an agreement of this magnitude. Coming from someone who has taken law, and passed the BAR, I can tell you this would be quite the work load even for a seasoned lawyer to interpret.

[vv2]

lp

[Mauii]

Furthermore this is simply HIGHLIGHTS from a 300 page agreement that is written by lawyers. You, I'm guessing are NOT a lawyer. You are not qualified to read and interpret an agreement of this magnitude. Coming from someone who has taken law, and passed the BAR, I can tell you this would be quite the work load even for a seasoned lawyer to interpret.

[Provost]

These are #2 and #3 bullet points in the new agreement.. Im not sure why you choose to ignore them.

• $300 million in “Make-Whole” payments (outside the system) to compensate Players

for the reduced value of Player contracts in the early years of the new CBA.

• No contractual “roll backs” of Player Salaries.

300 million in make whole payments for the reduced value of player contracts - This indicates a rollback

Furthermore this is simply HIGHLIGHTS from a 300 page agreement that is written by lawyers. You, I'm guessing are NOT a lawyer. You are not qualified to read and interpret an agreement of this magnitude. Coming from someone who has taken law, and passed the BAR, I can tell you this would be quite the work load even for a seasoned lawyer to interpret.

[grandmaster]

I have fairly extensive experience in labour relations and have been at the negotiating table for several very large contracts (on the management side). A very large part of my work has been interpreting CBA language and presenting in front of arbitrators.

You are clearly not reading and/or comprehending the posts that have been made by me and others. I even made examples.

Rollback = a reduction in the pure number value of the contract. It has a specific meaning and mechanism that you are not following. You think that any dollar less in a player's pocket is a "rollback", that is simply not true. If you had passed the bar, you would understand that different language means different things. You are arguing with folks based on you wanting to use the term "rollback" as something general and vague when in fact it is a very specific term which means a certain thing.

A "rollback" is what happened LAST CBA (24% I believe) and according to BOTH parties is NOT what is happening this time. The owners aren't asking for it and the players are not offering it. The mechanism is escrow that will ensure the reduced player share. The "make whole" is not making up for a "rollback" but is instead meant to offset some of the reduction that will be felt by losing money in escrow.

The Sedin's contract is still for $6.1 million per year. It is not being dropped to $5.3 million per year as a rollback (which would apply to each of the remaining years of the current contract). A rollback would mean that even if league revenues tripled next year, the Sedin's would not get more than $5.3 million in salary... just that the total team salary cap would go up.

Using escrow mechanisms (different from rollback), if league revenues tripled next year... the Sedin's would make their original $6.1 in salary.

VERY DIFFERENT THINGS!!!!

The owners will write cheques for the full bi-weekly amount of the pay owed to each player. A deduction off of each those cheques (just like CPP or EI) will be made and put into a 3rd party trust in "escrow". At the end of the year the league and PA will calculate the total HRR revenue and the total player salary paid. If it turns out that the player salaries have exceeded the 50% mandated (is will be 100% certain to account for the sudden drop to 50% from 57%), the owners get cheques from the 3rd party escrow account for that amount.,, any remaining goes back to the individual players.

An interesting note is that escrow owed to the owners gets split up evenly between all 30 teams, and not by percentage of their payroll. Phoenix gets the same back as Vancouver even though the Vancouver players put more into the account. This is a backdoor way to do revenue sharing (funded by the players of course).

The "make whole" money isn't making up for a rollback, it is making it so that not as much has to go into escrow from each cheque. To drop to 50% revenue and maintain a $70 million cap means that players would probably have to put 25-30% of their paycheques into escrow and likely get little of it back. It may be that full amount goes into escrow anyways, but each player gets a portion of the "make whole" separately in order to take a little of the sting away from it.

A couple pages back I put in what I thought would be the simplest and most agreeable method for reducing the player share without causing too much pain. It involved dropping the cap immediately to the $59 million but lowering the cap hit on existing contracts by the same proportion. The "make whole" funds as already promised are enough to top up those salaries to about 97% of their full value for the next 3 years (assuming the same revenue levels as last year).

[D-Money]

I am definitely pro-player and pro-PA in this dispute. However, I gotta say:

Why shouldn't a buyout be charged to players' shares?

It is money going to players, based on what the teams are contractually obliged to pay them. Just because players have not lived up to the terms of the deal, to the point where the team would rather pay them to NOT play, doesn't mean that it should somehow not count as players' share of HRR.

From a philosophical standpoint, I think there should also be a stigma within the PA against sucking. If Scott Gomez signs a huge deal, and then proceeds to suck, and gets bought out, other players who had a reduced pie to get a share of should be mad at him. But if he signs it, plays fantastic, and earns every penny, fellow players will respect him for it.

[G-52]

The condescension is unnecessary. I think any and everyone is qualified to post in this thread. I didn't take the law path following my undergrad, so you win that pissing contest. I am currently working on a masters at SFU.

It seems I fell for the cap hit vs salary fallacy. My points early were concerned with the amnesty buyout (point 6), of which the buyouts would be covered by the players share. The amnesty buyout exists only to enable teams to be in compliance with the salary cap. It was an earlier article which examined the Canucks current salary woes with the 2013/14 season which led me down that path of thinking.

So if I'm getting this straight, the players still receive full value of their salaries (as stipulated by the highlights section), but the extent of their contracts being damaged is covered by the 300mil. In terms of cap hits, your assumption is all of the players' cap hits would be decreased by 15% in order to allow for compliance?

[Provost]

PROVOST - Ill admit you are correct one one point, I did not read your previous posts. Im short on time and they are all very long. I read the jist of your last post and from the quick read through it sounded like we were talking about the same thing. I realize a rollback is in their contracts not their salary. The make whole provision is to compensate for the rollback in player contracts once the share goes from 57% to 50% which is a 14% rollback in contracts.

As stated im short on time as per usual, I gotta go.

[G-52]

1. A good general rule is not to start arguments when you don't bother reading what you decide to argue about.

2. It is even a better idea not to be condescending to other people when you don't know what you don't know what you are talking about.

3. You are still wrong in using the term rollback to try to make it seem like you are not wrong. It is the wrong term, it means something different than you want it to.

4. Claiming to by "too busy" to end an argument you had plenty of time to start is lame.

[Primal Optimist]

The owners will write cheques for the full bi-weekly amount of the pay owed to each player. A deduction off of each those cheques (just like CPP or EI) will be made and put into a 3rd party trust in "escrow". At the end of the year the league and PA will calculate the total HRR revenue and the total player salary paid. If it turns out that the player salaries have exceeded the 50% mandated (as will be 100% certain to account for the sudden drop to 50% from 57%), the owners get cheques from the 3rd party escrow account for that amount.,, any remaining goes back to the individual players.

The "make whole" money isn't making up for a rollback, it is making it so that not as much has to go into escrow from each cheque. To drop to 50% revenue and maintain a $70 million cap means that players would probably have to put 25-30% of their paycheques into escrow and likely get little of it back. It may be that full amount goes into escrow anyways, but each player gets a portion of the "make whole" separately in order to take a little of the sting away from it.

A couple pages back I put in what I thought would be the simplest and most agreeable method for reducing the player share without causing too much pain. It involved dropping the cap immediately to the $59 million but lowering the cap hit on existing contracts by the same proportion. The "make whole" funds as already promised are enough to top up those salaries to about 97% of their full value for the next 3 years (assuming the same revenue levels as last year).