While the NHL lurches toward a Saturday night lockout, its ultimatum rejected by the union Wednesday night, hockey’s winningest-ever goalie says he will consider playing in Europe during the stoppage.
“Yes, but not right away,“ Martin Brodeur told The Post. The 40-year-old, who has played only for New Jersey and Canada since reaching the NHL for good in 1993, signed a two-year deal worth a total of $9 million in July to return to the Devils. He owns the NHL records of 1191 games, 656 victories and 119 shutouts.
Brodeur confounded skeptics last season by going 31-21-4, including a 16-5-2 midseason stretch for New Jersey, leading the Devils to the Stanley Cup finals for the fifth time in his 18th NHL season.
An overseas Brodeur became more likely last night after the Players Association rejected Wednesday’s limited-time NHL offer. Commissioner Gary Bettman pledged to yank the proposal off the table at 12:01 a.m. Sunday, when his promised lockout would begin.
Bettman’s latest offer trims his demand to cut players’ share of hockey revenue from the current 57 percent to 49 percent, dropping to 47 percent over the six-year deal. Bettman’s August offer was to slice their share to 46 percent, up from his initial July 13 demand of 43 percent.
“With every day we’re experiencing damage to the game and the business of the game. What we’re prepared to do before we suffer more damage will not be the same after we suffer significant damage,” Bettman said of his deadline ultimatum.
Unmentioned was the damage players endure from loss of salary.
“When you talk about a lockout, you threaten a lockout, you persuade season ticket holders and advertisers that there’s going to be a lockout, then you impose a lockout, then you want somebody else to pay for it. Make your own judgments,” union head Donald Fehr said.
Fehr also noted the 1 percent improvement over the NHL’s previous offer.
“Someone might say they moved from an extraordinarily large amount [of pay cuts] to a very big amount,” Fehr said.
Bettman said his side crafted its latest offer after receiving the union’s proposal at the start of Wednesday’s 2½-hour meeting.
“Their proposal was really not much different, other than a couple of things around the edges, of what we made clear was not acceptable,” Bettman said.
Bettman made clear that his offer expires with the start of Lockout III.
“It had meaningful movement in it. It was an attempt to engage the union to make a deal,” Bettman said. “What we did today will be off the table if [it doesn’t result] in a deal before the expiration of the collective bargaining agreement [Saturday night].”
Wednesday’s meeting included Bettman and deputy Bill Daly, and owners Jeremy Jacobs of Boston and Murray Evazns of Calgary. The union brought a contingent of nearly 20, including eight players.
Bettman said the union offer was “nothing worth going into.”
Meanwhile, the union filed suit in Quebec asking that the league be prohibited from a lockout there because it is not certified there or in any other Canadian province. The union has already made its case, which it believes it won, in Alberta, but was thwarted in Ontario.
The NHL has been plagued by labor strife since the Players Association struck for 10 days late in the 1991-92 season, a move which enraged the owners and led to the replacement of NHL president John Ziegler with Gil Stein, soon to be replaced with Bettman. In short order, Bettman oversaw the 1994-95 lockout, pulling the plug on hoopla following the Rangers’ Stanley Cup, gaining the thin edge of the wedge with a rookie cap, but giving dearly on free agency. The league played a 48-game 1995 season upon agreement.
In the last lockout, which cost the NHL the 2004-05 season, the league held firm for a salary cap, which it gained after union head Bob Goodenow was deposed in a coup, following his offer of a 24 percent pay cut instead of a cap. The league gained both, but salaries rose anyway.