*Official* CBA Negotiations and Lockout Thread

[The Bookie]

My apologies for posting in your thread, i didn't see the private conversation tab.

I am just saying that if they have capitulated the 50% HRR point, there is very very little left to argue about: contract term maximums is an issue that affects less than 7% of the players, and the length of the CBA...well I don't really have anything but a fans perspective on it....make it as long as humanly possible so we don't have this type of thing for a long long time.

I think that 7 year contracts that are front loaded are a salary cap circumvention, when a player makes 10million in a year of a long contract and 1 million in another year of the same contract, that is salary cap circumvention. I don't see any other way to put it. Defense of long contracts is in a term: indefensible. As a fan I would like to see the league minimum salary go up, the term of contracts go down, and the longest cba we can possibly get. The 50% seems to be agreed upon....so why are we not playing hockey now? The rest is small potatoes and indefensible possitions.

[Boudrias]

"Fans on here view ownership as nothing less than Attila the Hun."

My point was simply that if ownership wanted a "collegial" approach from players, perhaps they'd refrain from reducing them to "cattle" or "expenses."

[Boudrias]

There is every opportunity for the majority of players to move on and make even more money than before.

Lets say, for example that more than half of the current players make less than the AVERAGE of 2.4 million dollars a year. 50+% makes less than that amount. What is stopping a future entity and the NHL from making a CBA that pays 1.2m as an entry level and guarantees 2.5m after 3 years.

23 players times 2.5m = 57.5 million cap. Less if say 6 players per team are in the first three years...so that would trim 7.8m and make the cap sub 50 million per team.

At that point, other 'star players' could come back and sign for up to 5m and we would see a league where great hockey is played with no player eating up more than 5m of the cap..and the cap at 50% of revenues....its easy..if the 7% of players who make insane money at hockey were not driving the NHLPA negotiations.

Crosby should not be there in the room, his 15 team mates who make less than the average should be. That is all.

[EmployeeoftheMonth]

Want to be more specific with your insults? Who's weird, and what are they misinformed about?

[Primal Optimist]

Primal the NHL hasn't given up anything all they've been doing is taking (taking the players HRR share, taking away monies owed to them under contract, taking away contracting rights)

[EmployeeoftheMonth]

if you look on the previous page, EotM was having an argument with VancouverCanucksRock (who seems to have developed a hybridized style of trolling between fwybwed's incoherent gibberish and drybone's aggressive random capitalization) so I assume that was directed towards them

[Primal Optimist]

a million dollar player has already lost 500k so far during the lockout. His salary might rollback to 900k due to the reduced HRR. Over the next five years of play that player will have lost 500k if not for the ever increasing total HRR. In every year we saw the salary cap go up and so it impossible to say that the player will lose 500k over five years, because his share of the rising cap will rise...and so we have a million dollar player who just gave up half a million dollars trying to defend less than half a million dollars over five years...five years being longer than the average players time as a full time NHL player.

The average jock in the union is being abused by Fehr and the upper 5% of players in terms of salary and I don't like it.

[poetica]

My point was not that ownership 'wanted a collegial approach from players' but that it might have been in the players interest to pursue that approach rather than a confrontational one. That option is dead now but might be pursued after the next CBA is signed.

[Primal Optimist]

without getting a grip on costs, there could be four less teams in the league and the remaining teams may trim up to five roster spots off their rosters...

4 teams worth of players: 100 Union Jobs

4th line and bottom two dmen times 26 remaining teams: 100 Union Jobs.

If this "UNION" were interested in its memberships best interests it would agree that capping contract length is important. 200 Union Jobs for guys who will make millions performing those jobs is just sound common sense.

For the record, i resent being called ignorant because I agree with the NHL in this labour dispute, guy who posted above me.

[poetica]

...

The idea that there must be capitulation by the league on the length of contracts allowed becuase the players agreed to a 50/50 split is absurd. Also, the idea the players must swallow everything the league is offering is absurd.

But the thing is: the difference now is so minute, or it was last week so minute, that Fehr really just opted to die on the 2 extra years of contract length hill. A hill that only affects 7% of players...a very small fraction of the highest paid players that get offered morethan 5 year contracts...

How that can be defended as a 'proper' stance is beyond me.

...

[gizmo2337]

I guess its all in how you view the CBA and player contracts as a legal entity. I guarantee you that each and every contract has a clause in it that binds it to a current CBA.

[Drive-By Body Pierce]

m.espn.go.com/nhl/story?storyId=8754861&wjb

No winning this lame blame game

First, let's be a man and admit when we're wrong.

My summer outlook for the NHL lockout months ago was puck-drop by mid-December.

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Nope, the most illogical and incomprehensible labor battle in the history of pro sports has found a way to drag its way into the holiday season.

Somehow, a deal that isn't that far at all -- on paper, at least -- is threatening to get worse with the legal battle now under way between the NHL and NHL Players' Association.

The only hope of having any hockey this season is if the looming threat of the union dissolving itself and the two sides duking it out in court provides one last jolt of urgency to the moderates on both sides to try to get over the final hurdles of this deal.

As of Monday morning, however, no talks were scheduled between the NHL and NHLPA.

So what now?

"We will continue to explore options for moving the process forward, and we hope the players' association is doing the same," deputy commissioner Bill Daly told ESPN.com via email Monday morning.

"Time is obviously getting short."

There is no official drop-dead date, although most people around the hockey world believe mid-January looms large in that regard.

Commissioner Gary Bettman has said anything less than a 48-game season wouldn't cut it, so you can't drop the puck past January and expect to pull that off, even with hockey in late June, which the league is prepared to do.

What is needed at this point is for one side to provide one more compromised offer, one that the moderate players could bring to the players at large for a vote. This is something moderates on both sides have indicated to ESPN.com over the past few days is how this thing finally ends.

Problem is, they disagree on how to come up with that proposal. The folks on the league/ownership side say it's up to the NHLPA to come up with the next proposal. The players we've talked to tell ESPN.com they believe it's up to the league to provide the next offer.

Picture me now banging my head against the wall. Repeatedly.

At holiday party gatherings over the past week, people from different walks of life approached me and asked just what this labor dispute is about and why it's dragged out so long. I now fumble at an answer. I'm not sure I can even provide a legitimate answer anymore.

I know this: I lay plenty of blame for the decision-making on both sides.

Looking back, the NHL made a terrible strategic mistake back in July with an original offer that asked for players to go down to 43 percent of hockey-related revenue, down from the 57 percent ir had in the previous deal. I cannot tell you how many level-headed NHL players -- not militants but rather moderates -- have told me repeatedly how that first offer from the NHL last July felt like a punch to the head and galvanized the player membership in a way in which Don Fehr himself likely could have never managed on his own.

That offer set the tone for the level of mistrust that has plagued what should have been a simpler negotiation, the players knowing deep down all along that they'd be accepting a 50-50 split of revenues.

On the other side of things, the NHLPA's executive director, Fehr, is also showing his true colors of late. The longtime baseball union leader seems hard to pin down. It just seems like whenever the league moves on what Fehr deemed a critical issue -- such as funding the "make-whole" provision and then upping it to $300 million -- that the NHLPA boss finds new demands to throw the league's way, the latest being his desire to cap escrow as part of the transition rules.

All of which just feeds into the long-held criticism from NHL owners that Fehr can't close a deal.

Listen, let's be clear here: The players have done most of the giving in this negotiation. There's no way you can argue otherwise. But as I've long maintained, that had to be the understood context of this negotiation from Day 1. Because of labor deals in the NFL and NBA last year, when players backed up financially, NHL players were always going to be subject to the same. It's an industry standard you can't escape.

So Fehr's responsibility all along was to make the best out of that negative backdrop. And in many ways, he has. His patience in this negotiation has helped get his membership the kind of offer from the league that I never imagined would ever be available -- $300 million in "make-whole"? -- but there comes a time when you have to know when to cut your losses.

Not having a 2012-13 season will irreparably damage the NHL industry.

And in a comment that I'm hearing more and more from people on the ownership side, I'm not sure the NHL returns with 30 teams on the other side of a lost season. Can the weaker markets truly survive this? That's damage both sides would feel.

I'm not sure it's possible anymore to shake off the emotion that has suffocated logical thought. But here's hoping it is.

Because getting a deal done is the only option that truly makes any sense. Well, at least for anyone who still cares about the game itself anymore.

[poetica]

Anybody have a template of a SPC, or where to get one?

[gizmo2337]

I would assume then, that since it does not explicitly say the contract is unenforceable without a CBA, until a new one is agreed upon the old one stands at least in regard to individual contracts, which is likely what the players would argue in court if the union were dissolved. And it would probably be successful, which is probably why the NHL specifically asked that the court rule these contracts void.

[poetica]

NHL preoccupied with crushing NHLPA

I vividly recall chatting with Jeff O’Neill the day the lockout ended in 2005. Upon discovering that veterans with 10 years experience would get a single hotel room on the road, O’Neill quipped, “Boy we really took them to the cleaners on that one, didn’t we?”

That was the tone of things in 2005. The league had not only triumphed in CBA talks, it absolutely crushed the players. It had reduced the union and its leadership to scorched earth and the players had been forced to accept a salary cap after missing a season of paychecks. The teams would now know the cost of doing business and for most of them, it would be much, much lower.

And we all know how that turned out.

Whenever this lockout does finally end – and it will someday – perhaps it would be wise for all of us to refrain from succumbing to the temptation to declare winners and losers. Because I truly believe that one of the major reasons why the league has taken such a hard line this time around is it was portrayed as the big winner and it managed to fritter away its advantages in record time.

That has led Gary Bettman & Co., to try to construct an even more idiot-proof CBA this time around, one that is so iron clad that you won’t even be able to get a piece of dental floss through it, forget about a loop. When Bettman spoke to the media after talks blew up (again) in early December, he acknowledged, “Listen, collective bargaining is hard stuff and sometimes it is made even harder depending on the goals and objectives that people have and organizations have.”

Nailed it, Gary. Negotiating a deal as complex as this one is difficult at the best of times, but when the goal of the league is to save its teams from themselves and score a decisive knockout at the same time, should we be surprised that the players and their leader, Don Fehr, display the kind of resolve we’ve been seeing throughout the dispute?

So that leaves us in a complete mess at the moment. Instead of working toward a deal that some people think is there for the making, the league and players have instead chosen to polarize themselves even further from one another. For the next four days, the players will conduct a vote on whether or not their union leadership should abandon its responsibility for representing them. Just so we have this straight, the players are going to vote on whether or not to effectively disband as a union, only to reassemble once the lockout ends.

The league, on the other hand, is intent on exposing this tactic as the sham that it is and has filed notice with the National Labor Relations Board that pursuing disclaimer of interest is tantamount to bargaining in bad faith by the NHLPA. Yes, this tactic is a travesty, and completely circumvents the spirit of what is intended. The way the owners abused the salary cap, they should have a pretty good idea of what that’s like. And given their almost complete lack of respect for the NHLPA, they should have a pretty good idea what constitutes bad faith bargaining, too.

If you had told the owners during the last lockout that they would get their way with cost controls, see their revenues skyrocket and get rid of Bob Goodenow, they would have been tripping over each other to break out the most expensive champagne. And that’s precisely what happened. The only problem was that it created an environment where the league and the owners were under the impression that they had destroyed the players and their hold over them would be almost as tight as it was during the days of the C-Form.

And they still managed to mess it up. That doesn’t mean they don’t have the right to get it correct this time, but anytime the pendulum swings too far to one side, the other is going to strengthen its resolve. The reality is there is not a CBA out there that can make all 30 teams healthy and profitable because of the markets in which a good number of them are situated. But that doesn’t mean Bettman and the league won’t continue fighting for them, even to the point where they might even forget what they’re fighting for.

Almost everyone acknowledges that the league has already won. Now all that is to be determined is the margin of victory. That’s what everyone was saying seven years ago, too, but the NHL is intent on making those words prophetic this time. And that’s the main reason why 94 days into this lockout, we’re still not watching any hockey.

[M A K A V E L I 96]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UE24MRiCpTM

[poetica]

I'd plus you for that video, M A K A V E L I 96, but it cuts a little too close to the bone.

[lorentjd]

Has anyone notice the "thumbs up" and "thumbs down" counts over at tsn.ca? The readers are overwhelmingly against the players.

When this labor dispute started, I was kinda split between putting the blame on the owners versus the players. The longer this mess is getting stretched out, the angrier I'm getting at the players. And this idea of voting to "dissolve" the union is just making it even worse because it will almost certainly mean a lost season now.

Memo to Players: If you just would have taken a 50-50 split on revenues, this would be over. Yeah, you'd have lost 12% of your salaries. But, now, you're going to lose at least 12% (very likely much more). And, for you players with only two, three or four years left in your playing careers? You're blowing away a huge percentage of your remaining income as a professaional hockey player. On top of that? Several teams will likely fold after this is over, meaning many of you "union brothers" are going to be out in the cold without a job.

I just can't believe how incredibly stupid the players are being.

[JAH]

without getting a grip on costs, there could be four less teams in the league and the remaining teams may trim up to five roster spots off their rosters...

4 teams worth of players: 100 Union Jobs

4th line and bottom two dmen times 26 remaining teams: 100 Union Jobs.

If this "UNION" were interested in its memberships best interests it would agree that capping contract length is important. 200 Union Jobs for guys who will make millions performing those jobs is just sound common sense.

For the record, i resent being called ignorant because I agree with the NHL in this labour dispute, guy who posted above me.

[DeNiro]

So if we base things on the 94-95 lockout I think it's safe to assume that January 20th is the absolute drop dead date for having a season.

That season they managed to squeeze in 48 games and extended the season into May. They also only had inter-conference games. So if there is a season, it could be a positive thing for the Canucks, since their record against the West has been really good the past few seasons.