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Federal mediation provides no help at deadline

Friday, August 31, 2007

With the deadline approaching to start working on a agreement or lose the season, the NHL and NHLPA met with federal mediators in Washington Sunday. It was the same old story -- no progress.

NHL executive vice-president Bill Daly, outside counsel Bob Batterman, NHLPA senior director Ted Saskin and outside counsel John McCambridge met for five hours with officials from U.S. Federal Mediation & Conciliation Service.

According to the Players' Association, the two sides were contacted Friday by the acting director of the FMCS, who requested the Sunday meeting. It was the third such meeting meeting between the two sides and the FMCS.

But, like just about every other meeting involving the league and the PA over the past several months, there was no progress to report.

"Today, the parties met for the third time with FMCS officials. There was no progress to report as a result of this meeting, and in fairness to the process it would serve no purpose to comment further," Saskin said in a statement.

Daly had this to say in a statement: "No progress in the collective bargaining process resulted from the meeting. We have no further comment."

Later Sunday evening Daly had this to say in an e-mail to USA Today: "As of today, we are no further along than we were when talks broke off on Thursday. The Union has not reached out to us, and no further collective bargaining sessions have been scheduled."

Sportsnet in Canada reported that unless a last minute miracle happens, the league has called a meeting for Monday where it will outline the cancellation of the season.

The official announcement of the cancellation reportedly would come Tuesday or Wednesday, making the National Hockey League the first North American sports league to cancel an entire season from start to finish.

There has been speculation that until the season is unofficially cancelled anything could still happen to jump start another round of negotiations. But even the most optimistic observers are starting to consider the chances of that happening very, very remote.