When they next meet in Manhattan Tuesday, the NHL and its Players Association will have spent a grand total of four hours in face-to-face negotiations in the span of 11 days.
And the Sept. 15 lockout will only be 18 days away.
The first full-team negotiations in eight days between the NHL and its Players Association ended this morning in Toronto after only 90 minutes. Little progress was made in bridging what both sides agree is a wide gap.
Talks among the top two executives for each side – NHL commissioner Gary Bettman, deputy Bill Daly, Players Association director Donald Fehr and his special assistant, brother Steve Fher – are slated to resume Tuesday in Manhattan. Those four met some 2 ½ hours Wednesday before today’s meeting of both full negotiating teams.
The NHLPA today finished submitting the remaining parts of its CBA proposal after offering the major economic points last week.
Bettman told reporters that the sides remain far apart, even on what points to negotiate. He wants to settle the issue of player compensation, which he regards as the crux of the matter.
“We believe we’re paying out more than we should be. It’s as simple as that,” Bettman said.
“It’s going to be very difficult to move these issues along until we deal with the fundamental economic issues, and as far as the fundamental economic issues are concerned, we are far apart, both in magnitude and structure. That’s something we’re trying to get a handle on,” Bettman said.
Bettman intimated that the union is dragging its feet.
“From our perspective, what it looks like, the players have done very well under this deal,” Bettman said. “The average salary has gone from $1.45 million to $2.45 million. If given their druthers, and they’ve said publicly they’d be happy to keep playing under this deal even while we negotiate. While we were prepared to negotiate a year ago, the union said it wasn’t ready until the end of June. You can’t negotiate with yourself.
“My sense is they prefer to keep things the way they are and that kind of slows up the process.”
Donald Fehr said the league is already getting a bargain.
“We know that the players’ fair market value, what the owners would pay in the aggregate if they didn’t have the restrictions of the cap, is vastly above the current agreement,” Fehr said. “What they’ve said is that the players in football and basketball took less. We’ve reminded them that every sport has its own economics.
“If basketball got a higher percentage, would they be proposing a higher percentage? Of course, they said ‘No.’ We reminded them the only sport that is stable is baseball. It has no cap, has revenue sharing and has zero labor relations problems the last 16 years. Only the cap sports have had lockouts.”
Today’s short session was the first between the full negotiating teams since Aug. 15 in New York. The sides cancelled Wednesday afternoon’s scheduled formal negotiations following the four-man morning session.
On July 13, the NHL asked the union to accept a share cut from 57 percent to 46 percent, which the union says would be 43 percent as currently accounted.
The union then proposed Aug. 14 to limit payroll total increases to 2,4 and 6 percent respectively in the next three years, with the option to revert to the present 57 percent cut of total hockey-related revenue in a fourth year.
The players’ pot would increase 2 percent from the current $1.87 billion to $1.91 billion, then to $1.99 billion, then to $2.11 billion. If lea