Friday, February 11, 2005

NHL talks take turn for worse

4-hour negotiating session goes nowhere; optimism dims for resolving dispute.

By Ted Kulfan / The Detroit News

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DETROIT -- With the NHL season in the balance, negotiations took a negative turn Thursday between owners and players.

The league and the NHL players' association met for approximately four hours in Toronto and apparently accomplished nothing.

With a deadline set for this weekend of salvaging this season, it would appear that a miracle is needed to end the lockout and salvage the season.

Commissioner Gary Bettman is expected to cancel the regular season early next week, if not sooner.

"Nothing today transpired to change that timetable," said Bill Daly, the NHL's chief legal counsel, in a teleconference Thursday afternoon.

No meetings are scheduled for today or any time this weekend. Neither Bettman nor NHLPA executive director Bob Goodenow addressed the media Thursday.

"Certainly, there is no expectation or optimism on this side that anything will happen before that announcement is made," Daly said.

Daly was grim in his assessment of Thursday's meetings, calling them "pointless".

"We didn't cover any new ground today," Daly said. "We talked about issues we had talked about numerous times before, as recently as last week.

"So I don't understand what their agenda was. I just know we didn't make any progress."

Ted Saskin, the NHLPA senior director, disputed Daly's opinion that it was up to the players to provide a plan.

"We're the only people who have made any proposals of any magnitude in these negotiations and we're done," said Saskin in a separate teleconference.

The sides met for just 90 minutes Thursday. he rest of the four-hour session was spent with each side in separate caucuses. No new proposals, systems or ideas were discussed.

One interesting revelation did emerge from Daly's teleconference with reporters: He revealed that federal mediators in the United States have been working with the sides almost from the start of the lockout on Sept. 15.

Mediators were last involved, Daly said, last week in Newark, N.J. But even mediation has failed to help resolve the dispute.

So, with so little progress, the end of this regular season that never was, appears mercifully near.

"If there are no further developments, the league will make a formal announcement on the status of the season in the very near future," said Gary Meagher, an NHL representative.

Bettman said the sides must be on the way to writing a new collective bargaining agreement this weekend or plans for a 28-game regular season will be scrapped.

"At this point, we're kind of out of tricks," Daly said.

The NHLPA rejected the NHL's offer Wednesday of a hybrid system that would begin with the players' Dec. 9 proposal that featured a luxury tax and an immediate 24 percent salary rollback.

If the league determined that the system was not working -- there are four triggers that could determine that -- the system would revert to the NHL's Feb. 2 proposal based on a salary cap of approximately $42 million.

"Nobody was fooled by any of those trigger points," said Saskin, adding the league's offer was a triple-salary-cap proposal.

"We will not reach out to the union at this point ... there's no further creativity left on this side in terms of trying to get a deal done," Daly said. "It's disappointing."

You can reach Ted Kulfan at (313) 223-460 or tkulfan@detnews.com.