CBA: Union rejects NHL's six concepts

Tuesday, August 17, 2004

The NHL and NHLPA met for five hours in Newark, New Jersey Tuesday, but both sides reported no progress towards a new CBA. The big news was that the union formally rejected the six concepts presented by the league one month ago.

NHL's Six Concepts

1.) A hard salary cap imposed on payrolls that teams would not be allowed to exceed.

2.) A Performance-Based Salary System, in which a player's individual compensation would be based, in part, on negotiated objective criteria and, in part, on individual and team performance.

3.) A Payroll Range System in which teams could spend within a negotiated range of payrolls.

4.) A system premised on the Centralized Negotiation of Player Contracts, where the League would negotiate individual player contracts, either with players and their agents or with the Union directly.

5.) A Player Partnership Payroll Plan (P-4), which would involve individual player compensation being individually negotiated on the basis of "units" allocated for regular-season payrolls, supplemented by lucrative bonuses for team playoff performance.

6.) A Salary Slotting System, which would contemplate each team being assigned a series of "salary slots" at various levels, each of which would be allocated among each team's players pursuant to individual player-team negotiation.

"I can't report that we made any progress today, because we didn't," NHL Chief Legal Officer Bill Daly said in an update on the league's official web site. "We asked the Players' Association directly as to what their response was with respect to the six proposals we made to them. I think they were very clear that they're not amenable to any of those proposals, so they've been rejected."

NHLPA senior director Ted Saskin summed up rejection of the concepts this way to the Canadian Press: "We've always said the six concepts they floated out were non-starters but we wanted to fully understand them (before rejected them). Now we want to continue the dialogue and hopefully canvass areas that can lead us to an agreement."

The two sides have scheduled more meetings. They will meet in Ottawa August 25-26 and again in Montreal August 31-September 1.

"Time is short at this point and we need to start making progress," Daly told the CP. "The fact of the matter is, after today's session, we're no closer to a solution, and that's worrisome."

Most of the five-hour meeting on Tuesday was spent on league economics.

"We spent today talking about league and team operations and economics. They told us they wanted to get a better sense of what was going on around the league and how the system impacted those things," Daly told the CP. "So we had a full five-hour dialogue on that."

Daley, in his comments on the league's web site, called on the NHLPA to offer some alternative solutions.

"We had a good dialogue today, and I would hope the dialogue we had was for a purpose; and I would hope at some point we would hear back from them as to whether they have any alternative solutions," said Daly.

Saskin said the NHLPA planned on doing just that, but he wouldn't say when.

"At the appropriate time we will be making a proposal but I just don't want to say that it will be at a particular meeting," Saskin told the CP. "We don't think that just throwing proposals out there is necessarily going to advance the process.

"We need to get to a common understanding and find some common ground and that's really what we're trying to do with the dialogue that was undertaken today. So hopefully we can put together proposals that address the issues in a meaningful way."

The union's last proposal, made in October, involved a luxury tax, a five percent rollback in player salaries and changes to the entry level system.

"I still think that's a framework that addresses the issues but at this point they've shown no interest in that," Saskin told the CP.

The league has said that plan wouldn't work then and it won't work now.

"We have less than 30 days now to the expiration date of the Collective Bargaining Agreement and we need to start talking about solutions," Daly said on the league web site. "We told the Union today that we're available every day between now and Sept. 15 to try to get this resolved."

NHL's Six Concepts
1.)	A hard salary cap imposed on payrolls that teams would not be allowed to exceed.
2.)	A Performance-Based Salary System, in which a player's individual compensation would be based, in part, on negotiated objective criteria and, in part, on individual and team performance.
3.)	A Payroll Range System in which teams could spend within a negotiated range of payrolls.
4.)	A system premised on the Centralized Negotiation of Player Contracts, where the League would negotiate individual player contracts, either with players and their agents or with the Union directly.
5.)	A Player Partnership Payroll Plan (P-4), which would involve individual player compensation being individually negotiated on the basis of "units" allocated for regular-season payrolls, supplemented by lucrative bonuses for team playoff performance.
6.)	A Salary Slotting System, which would contemplate each team being assigned a series of "salary slots" at various levels, each of which would be allocated among each team's players pursuant to individual player-team negotiation.