Thread: The Official CBA Negotiations/Lockout Super Thread

This month is the 50th anniversary of the Cuban missile crisis. If Fehr and Bettman had been in charge back then instead of JFK and Kruschev, the world would have been nuked many times over. As it is, I'm still waiting for sanity to prevail before another season is lost.

Originally Posted by jom

the NHL simply expanded too fast.....

The NHL didn't expand too fast, they expanded to locations that had absolutely no need for an NHL franchise. buttheadman is a complete idiot for even thinking teams in locations that didn't know **** about hockey was a good idea.

Lockout logic question:

This scenario looks to be playing out:

Player makes $4MM a year X 4 years = $16 million

Offered 20% roll back and an 82 game schedule

$16 million – 20% = $12,800,000

Player sees $3.2M in loss.


Players Decline the above offer and win but at the cot of the season - 50/50 with no rollback.


Player Y loses entire season and 1 year of contract

Player makes $12M and sees $4.0M in loss and grows one year older.
So essentially he trades 800K for one year of not playing.


Not to mention that league revenues will go way down so salary cap goes even further down and your next contract is lower.

So my question is why are the players listening to Fehr? He is gambling with their money and by not settling they lose out?


On a personal level I am amazed that the NHLPA players are willing to sacrifice so much of their own money to build a system that many of them wont likely ever see the the benefit from.
A year lost for a player is like 10 years for an average person when you realize how short their careers are.


What am I missing?

Originally Posted by HTK

What am I missing?

The players feel like the owners are pushing them around, which they are. They've been trained to "take one for the team" since they were five. Well, the NHLPA is their "team" right now. They know perfectly well what is going on. Read that Cammalleri interview, he said the owners are counting on us to break because we have short careers.

This negotiation is very much about winning and losing, and egos and not so much about money. The players' egos, the owners' egos and the egos of Bettman and Fehr. If this was only about money, we'd be watching hockey right now.

Originally Posted by Kubrick

Yet, they were the ones that put the current broken systems into place.

So? creating systems that work is a process and you will make mistakes along the way. Why would they create a business model (system) call CBA and make it last for 7 years only, don't you think they realized back then that it was going to need some tweaking after all?

Originally Posted by Bollocks

It was one thing when they just delayed the start, where players get only a certain percentage less money. But it's a COMPLETELY different story when a whole season is at stake. Here, the players would be incredibly foolish to try to force anything too radical. Hiring Fehr is now going to bite them in the ass. Not that I want the players to lose money, but the league as it is can't function properly. They HAVE to take a pay cut if they want to play hockey. Period.

What about the players proposals has been "radical?" And what in the last three proposals that the players put on the table (and that the NHL rejected in less than 30 minutes) was radical? It seems to be pretty obvious that the only radical proposal was the NHL's initial proposal to reduce salaries from 57 to 43% of HRR.

Originally Posted by bigfan3

The owners are the ones, clearly, that understand how to run a business and they knew then as much as they know, what needs to happen to make the league, as a whole, successful.

yup, roughly half of them are losing money and they clearly know how to run a business. I wouldn't trust Charles Wang to deposit my paycheck.

Originally Posted by aaron

The negotiations really started when the owners offered 50/50. Anything before that was just talk. And they weren't offering that until well into the lockout.

I don't think so. The players had been living high on the hog with 57% for many years while their salaries bloated, and the owners wanted that too since they take the risks and 18 clubs lost money. I think 60/40 is about right in favor of the owners and that they must have been feeling the pinch to jump up to 50/50. So you thinking it was a first step as opposed to a jump to the middle is not what many would think. And if that's what the players are thinking also i can see why we are in this stalemate. I really don't care who blinks and who gives as long as we have hockey, but to think this offer by the owners was a start is simply warped.

Originally Posted by D0wntime

What about the players proposals has been "radical?" And what in the last three proposals that the players put on the table (and that the NHL rejected in less than 30 minutes) was radical? It seems to be pretty obvious that the only radical proposal was the NHL's initial proposal to reduce salaries from 57 to 43% of HRR.

Is that a serious question? Maybe the fact that the players DID NOT link their percentage of the revenue for the elventy billionth time during these negotiations. The "50-50" split the players claimed they made in those three offers was contingent upon revenues continuing to grow at 5% annually. If revenues didn't grow annually at that rate, the players would get a much larger percentage of the revenue. The owners would be the stupidest people in the world to make a deal ASSUMING revenues would continue to grow at a steady pace. There are no guarantees in life.

I have to say both sides have screwed the pooch on this one. Just like nothelen said today they are quibbling over a few million a team. Seems like they are both petulant boys in this disagreement. They could have (no SHOULD HAVE) settled by now and built on the success AND $3B in revenue they made last year.