First, I think Gary’s apology was sincere. I don’t think he is a good enough actor to come across as that contrite and he did come across as contrite. Still, I wish that he had been far more specific about why he was apologising. “I’m sorry that I miscalculated the player resolve, underestimated Donald Fehr and took the fans for granted” is vastly different than “I’m sorry that it was necessary to shut down the game to get my way.”

What we saw from Gary was genuine regret, but not a mea culpa.

Even if we are generous enough to accept that Gary was taking responsibility, were there any indications in the press conference that the league has learned anything? I don’t think so. Bettman talked about the need for the league to regain the trust of the fans and he talked about the need to build trust between the league and the NHLPA. Fair enough, but he does not seem to understand that trust is earned by trustworthy people. That requires honesty.

There were three small things he said during his press conference that tells me he hasn’t learned anything. None of them are earthshaking, but they did not signal anything resembling a new attitude:

1) He implied that the deal brought labour peace for the next ten years when the league can choose to have another lockout in eight years if Bettman decides that is in his interest. (Is there a difference between a ten year deal with an option for either party to terminate it after eight years and an eight year deal?)

2) When asked why anyone should buy the idea the league wants a “partnership” between the league and the players again, he blamed the failure to develop that partnership on instability in the NHLPA over the past eight years. Even if we pretend that the instability was entirely the fault of the players, blaming them is not the way to improve the relationship. The positive way forward?

“We recognize that we can’t do this to our fans any more. The fact of the matter is that we have to be a lot better at labour relations and we are determined to improve. Our actions over the next decade will speak a lot louder than any words I could utter today.”

3) Bettman’s effusive praise of Don Fehr and the players on the negotiating committee was not credible. Everyone knows that Donald Fehr drove Bettman crazy over the course of this negotiation and everyone knows there is a great deal of bitterness – on both sides – hanging over the settlement. Bettman does not seem to understand that this bitterness cannot be swept under the rug with faux flattery.

Again the positive way forward is to acknowledge the bitterness, and acknowledge the league’s utter failure in respect to labour relations. The only time the NHL has had labour peace was when the NHLPA was a corrupt organization with crooked leadership.

“The history of labour relations in this sport has been a disgrace for more than fifty years. Both sides can and should be faulted for that disgrace. I can understand why neither the fans or the players believe that this collective bargaining agreement marks a new beginning but, on our side, we are determined to make it so. We are sorry and we have learned a lesson. I’m asking the fans and the players to give us a chance to earn your trust.”

Is that what Gary meant with his “personal” statement?

I wish.

While I admit some gratitude
Fuck you remains my attitude
Although I love to see them play
My distaste still is in the way

Because that’s not how things will be
I find I am ashamed of me

It should be easy to be a hockey fan. The sport is fast, furious, and thoroughly entertaining. The athletes exhibit great skill, courage and character. The sport has a rich history, storied franchises, and – at least in Canada – deep cultural roots. It should be easy to be a fan even if it is nothing more than hoping that the home team is – this year, finally, – favoured by randomness.

Instead of being easy, it is very hard these days. Lou Lamoriello declared he was “embarrassed” by the lockout (and so he should be), but the league should be far more worried about the fact that the Jenny Wrens of the world are embarrassed to be hockey fans. Even before the recent fiasco, we have been forced to defend fighting and gratuitous violence while witnessing horrific injuries. We are supposed to think it is okay when guys like Daryl Katz try to jerk luxurious arenas out of a city. It’s okay that taxpayer subsidized corporate ticket buyers drive up the price of hockey for everyone else and when cable companies force a sports tax on nonfans. And, well, if the owners think they aren’t getting enough bucks, they take their puck and go home. Is there another industry where I love the product while despising the owners, the commissioner and the administration that delivers the product?

I’m a hockey fan. It’s embarrassing.

1) The new CBA – whatever the provisions turn out to be – will be bad for the fans and the game. None of the league problems have been solved.

2) The season to come will be a joke, and if history is a guide, a not particularly funny joke for the Vancouver Canucks and other Western teams. The compressed schedule will find them flying frantically around North America while only the Eastern Champion might play a game outside their time zone.

3) For the players, virtually every new provision in the CBA represents a concession of some sort. The owners “won” the dispute, in the sense that the players will get a lot less money than under the old CBA. Furthermore, the players lost several hundred million in salary and won the possibility of revenue losses in future seasons. Financially, they would have been better off saving the salary, caving to the owners without a lockout, and tugging on the forelock.

On the other hand, the Donald Fehr strategy turned out to be pretty effective. The players could not win this dispute, so Fehr made sure that Gary Bettman, the owners, and the league were losers too. While the strategy did smack of cutting off his nose to spite his face, he hopes he’s taught the league a lesson about their lockout strategy. In the end, the league wanted a deal a lot more than Donald Fehr wanted a deal.

The owners might not be quite so willing to take on the players next time. (Although I doubt it. These are the clowns running the worst managed sports league in history after all.)

4) Gary Bettman will probably survive in the short run despite the fact that he underestimated Don Fehr, miscalculated the player resolve and did great damage to the NHL brand. If he has also miscalculated the willingness of the fan to forgive and forget, he is in big trouble, but I think that is unlikely. Fans in the hockey markets will keep showing up and fans in the zombie markets hardly noticed the lockout anyway.

Still, what can the league do to placate the fans given they do not have a new NHL to trot out? Throw Bettman to the mob. We can only hope.

Hurrah. I guess.

I don’t think the pre-emptive lawsuit launched by the NHL will produce anything that matters. I agree with Jonathan Willis that the NHLPA has a better case than the NBAPA. There are also interesting jurisdictional issues at play here, so I don’t think the case is quite the slamdunk the league pretends.

Still, I think the league is likely to prevail because I think that the majority of players will be voting to decertify because they believe it is the next logical step in the negotiating process. The NHL may have difficulty demonstrating it, but in my view truth is on their side. The players don’t see this vote as stepping off the cliff. We don’t hear players claiming they will be better off without the Union or extolling the benefits of a free market. To most of them this is the same next step that was taken by the NFLPA and the NBAPA.

The NHL may have a winning hand in court at this point, but it will almost certainly be a meaningless win. The tale will be told in the next couple of weeks. If the decertification is a ploy, a deal will be struck and Gary Bettman will declare that hockey has been saved for once and for all. If the decertification is real, events will prove it so, and the league will face antitrust suits they won’t be able to dismiss as ploys.

In the meantime it is amusing to watch the upside down world of labour relations in sports entertainment. In the real world, if a labour union decertified in the middle of a lockout, the employers would cheer, declare victory, throw open their doors and invite everyone back into the fold. The NHL filed a lawsuit and threatened to fire every employee if they dare decide collective bargaining is hurting instead of helping them. Crazy. I also really enjoyed the NHL effort to paint the NHL-NHLPA historical relationship as something other than toxic.

I’d write the whole dance off as an amusing waste of time except… Donald Fehr. What on earth is he doing? He can see where the court case is going and even if he thinks he can win it, any victory is several weeks away and by then the season is gone. Why is he blindly following the NBAPA into nowhere? And doing it so late? This is the brilliant Donald Fehr?

And what’s with the vote on the disclaimer of interest? It isn’t necessary and to me it appears to hurt the court case. The vote drags out the process and it makes the decertification move look more like a negotiating ploy.

What does Donald Fehr have up his sleeve as the decertification dance winds down? I don’t know, but I do know that the players may be voting as a negotiating tactic, but the vote isn’t counted as a tactic. It is counted as a vote to dissolve the Union as a bargaining entity. It cuts the players out of any informal talks and it gives Donald Fehr a mandate to blow up the league if he thinks real decertification is in the best interest of the players.

Gary Bettman might like his chances in court, but I wonder if his eye is on the right ball. I’d be worried about the power the players are about to give to Don Fehr. How will Gary feel about (the impossible to deal with and entirely unpredictable) Donald Fehr having the power to kill the season and turn Gary’s league on its head?

Heh, heh.

Tyler Dellow has written about the remaining major sticking points blocking an agreement. I agree with what he wrote about the term of the new collective agreement. Most fans may be hoping for a long deal simply so we won’t have to endure this again for at least another decade. I’m with the players on this one because I think a long deal makes a lockout ten years down the road a near certainty. We’d see a repeat of this season with the NFL, NBA and NHL all bent on extracting another chunk of cash from the players with a “give us the money or we lock you out” bargaining strategy.

Would the NHL dare adopt that same approach in four or five years? In six? I’m betting the league would find a way to make a deal next time around if the CBA term is short.

On the other issue, I think both Tyler and the NHLPA are wrong on the length of player contract dispute. I do not believe long contracts help the middle class at the expense of the rich. In fact, I think it does the reverse. It gives the stars money that would otherwise go to the rank and file. (It may be true that the CBA as a whole hurts the elite players more than the lesser lights, but I can’t see any argument that concludes that these long contracts do anything to help most players.) Yes, the structure of Parise’s contract makes cap space available for middle class players, but cap space is not dollars and players are paid in dollars.

Over the first nine years of his contract, Parise will be paid some $20 MM over his cap hit. That money is made up (through escrow) by all the players in the league. The Wild will then probably buy out the Parise contract and take a cap hit of about $800,000 over the next eight years. Those payments will also be made out of the pockets of all the players.

The problem with these deals from the league perspective is that they are clearly cap circumvention. The Wild are gaining about $20 MM in cap space over the first nine years and paying it back with about $5.3 MM in space over the following eight. Teams that can’t afford these types of deals – a significant majority of teams – consider them cheating, because, well, they are cheating the spirit of the cap. Bettman must be under considerable pressure to ban them.

Fehr’s premise is that Parise would get substantially more money per year on a shorter contract. I don’t think that is necessarily true. A team like the Canucks (or the Wild in this case) are willing to spend a lot more than the salary cap allows them to spend. The issue for the Canucks will never be the dollars. The issue for them will always be the cap hit. They would happily give a Parise quality player $12 MM a year, but they would never allocate that much cap space to him. Absent these long contracts, a Parise would get somewhat more on a shorter deal, but I don’t think he will get a ton more. Teams need top notch players to win, but they also need quantity as well as quality. Spending $12 MM (in cap space) on a single player is not a winning strategy in my opinion.

I don’t know how the parties will sort these issues out but I don’t have any doubt that they will. After all they have given up, the players are not going to tank the whole year over a couple of years on the term of the CBA. The league will not sink another season to stop teams from signing a player to a seven year contract.

A deal is coming. We’ll see how many people still care.

1) So far at least, the decertification noise sounds less like an effort to blow up the Union and more like an attempt to improve their negotiating position.

2) If the season goes, I hope the players do blow it up. The fans will be better off.

3) I think the players will be better off without a CBA too, but decertification means chaos and uncertainty, while collapsing and signing Gary Bettman’s CBA means billions in the player’s pockets.

4) If the players do not fight now, they will face the same situation again and again. Even if the threat of decertification marginally improves the owner offer, a marginally improved offer still represents a big financial hit for the players.

This is the worst outcome, the outcome that the players simply had to avoid. People like me will be able to correctly say: “They should have taken Bettman’s final offer to save the season. They would be much better off today.”

The question still remains: What will the players do? What will Don Fehr do?

Donald Fehr took the job for a reason and I don’t think it was to meekly follow the NBAPA and NFLPA playbooks into the CBA Gary Bettman wants. Is he herding the players over the decertification cliff? What if Donald Fehr now believes that collective bargaining in sports is a process that has outlived it’s usefulness?

It would change sports entertainment in North America. That would be quite the legacy for Donald Fehr.

And for Gary Bettman.

Postscript: As usual this fan is torn. Do I want to see a deal that salvages some kind of a season even though that would mean the same administration doing the same things leading to the same outcomes? Or am I willing to see this season crash as the price to pay for a vastly different NHL next year?

I also agree with the opinion – held by both James and Tyler – that it would be crazy to blow off the season over $600 MM. Here’s Mirtle:

That’s roughly 3 per cent of hockey-related revenues. And losing a season over that would be absurd…

And it’ll be a 54-53-52-50-50-50 type slide that guarantees players their current contracts and gets it done.

That all seems reasonable, but the owners don’t agree. Three per cent does not sound like much, but it is a little less than half of what the NHL is demanding. The player offer might eventually get the league to 50/50, over the five years of the proposed CBA, the split is still a very unsatisfactory 53-47. How can Bettman show his face around David Stern if he takes that?

Furthermore, there is still HRR defining to do. The NHL wants to introduce some new costs to set against HRR, and the NHLPA wants subsidies from communities like Phoenix and Nashville included.

The owners can’t see how they can lose the dispute. If Gary’s anger is real it is because he cannot understand how the players can ignore the arithmetic. The owners cannot fathom that the players will be willing to lose half a season – and $900 MM in salary – in a fight over a little more than $100 MM a year and a few clarifications to HRR. The owners feel entitled to the money because it doesn’t pay the players to stop playing. Cancel the season? Gary Bettman believes that the players will fold long before that becomes an issue.

It seems clear to me that the players have decided they are going to fight, they are going to ignore the arithmetic, and they are prepared to sacrifice money and games. (Which would mean that Bettman has made a huge miscalculation. Bettman is betting that I’m wrong.)

Strategically, I think this means two things:

1) Donald Fehr and the players do not believe the owners will sink a season over a little more than $100 MM a year and a few clarifications to HRR.

2) If the players win the dispute, they won’t win it until January. Fehr wants to be dickering HRR with Gary Bettman on about January 15th, when the season hangs in the balance. I’m guessing that the players understand that this is the strategy and – barring a change in heart from the owners – have written off the first half of the season.

I think we have another three months to go before the negotiations get interesting again. I guess that makes me pessimistic.

Postscript: I think it is interesting that we haven’t heard anything about decertification so far in the negotiations. Both the NFLPA and the NBAPA had trotted out the threat by now. I don’t think we will hear anything about it until January. As soon as the season is lost, decertification becomes a pretty attractive option.

For the first time in this process, Bettman is ready to negotiate.

This must be business, not personal.

I don’t think there is anything personal affecting negotiations. The players are angry and they think Bettman is a dick, but they are very well aware that the objective is to get the game back on the ice. This is business and they know it.

But it is not clear that Bettman is ready to negotiate. Personally, I don’t believe he is doing anything more than executing a plan that has been in the works for months, if not years. No matter how negotiations had gone throughout the summer, the plan would have had Bettman tabling his best, final offer on October 15th, two weeks before the drop dead date for a full season. I think “Take it or leave it” is now the league’s position.

It is Donald Fehr’s job now to find out whether that indeed is the case. I think he will respond with an offer that accepts the league model but with a higher percentage. He’ll also want the players to retain an option to have the player percentage go back to 57% in the final year.

Is Gary really ready to negotiate? Or has he negotiated himself up to the settlement he has intended to impose on the players all along?

We’ll find out in the next few days. I hope I’m wrong. If I am, I expect Fehr and Bettman to huddle for a week and end up with a deal. If I’m right, the players are going to have to decide whether to take it or leave it.

The most recent NHL offer represents what is basically Gary Bettman’s final one before the league starts losing games (and revenue) for real. If Shoalts has the details more or less correct, the shape of the final CBA is at least in front of us.

In other words, we’ve reached crunch time. From the beginning I’ve said that Gary was coming for about $200 million a year. If the players take (more or less) what is on the table now, Bettman’s plan has worked out perfectly. For now, this is exactly where he wants to be. Way back in July, Greg Wyshynski published an interview with a player who explained why a 50-50 split – what’s now on the table – was unacceptable to the players. I wrote:

The owners think they can force the players to give them another big whack of cash. They appear willing to shut down the sport to get what they want. They believe the players will give them pretty much what they want before too many games have to be cancelled. They don’t think the players are willing to stay out long enough to threaten the season. This negotiation is not about resolving issues between the parties. It is about leverage and money and how the owners will go about the task of taking all they can possibly take.

What are the players going to do?

The question stands. The players have been put in a very difficult position. So far the public has been on their side for the most part. The league – and Gary Bettman – have taken more than a few lumps in the media. But if there has been a single thread throughout the media coverage it is that a 50-50 split of the revenues is both fair and inevitable. That’s all Bettman has cared about until this point.

Bettman’s position is suddenly reasonable – fair and inevitable even – only because he started negotiations from a ridiculous spot. Never mind the fact that he is demanding that the players (in the aggregate) take a 12% paycut when business is booming. The tide of public opinion will turn if the players don’t take their lumps now.

Do the players want to play?

Yes.

Does it make sense for most players to take a paycut in lieu of a lockout when careers are so short?

Yes, again.

Is it fair?

Of course not, but this isn’t about fair.

Will the owners do this every time a CBA expires?

You bet they will, but most of today’s players won’t be affected next time. Mostly the same owners, though.

Does it piss players off to get painted as the villains even though they keep taking less and less? Does it bother them to know how easily they can be exploited?

Oh, yeah.

My interests are best served if the players fold, but I can’t blame them – I’ll even admire them a little – if they choose to fight.

Postscript I: If the players do fold, I will wonder why they bothered to hire Donald Fehr. I’ve been impressed by him so far, but this is when he is supposed to pull the rabbit out of the hat. If he signs this deal, Bettman is a big winner.

Postscript II: The one thing that the players should absolutely not do is fight for a month to get 51% rather than 50%. Cave now or take them to the wall. No half measures. Tug the forelock or resolve to blow it up.

Sigh.

As far as anyone can tell, the owners – all of them very, very rich – want more money, and lots of it.

The players apparently want two things. First, while they are prepared to take less money going forward, they are not prepared to take a rollback on existing contracts either directly or through escrow. (And can we blame them? Craig Leipold knew Gary Bettman was going to try to slice off a big chunk of Ryan Suter’s contract before the ink on it had dried. How hypocritical is that? Step one, sign the contract. Step two, state publicly that the contract proves that the owners need a new deal. Step three, go on strike unless Suter agrees to give back several million dollars. That’s chutzpah. Can you buy that kind of gall?)

Second, the players want some sort of mechanism that prevents the owners from playing the lockout game again next time the parties sit down to negotiate. No matter where one stands on the money issue, every fan should hope that the players win on this final issue.

Besides that, I only hope that the players are prepared to lose another year. The last thing they – or we – need is for the players to stand united until December before collapsing and signing a deal only marginally better than they could get today.

We’ve all been there and done that. Either fold now or go all in. No half measures.