"I left the other day feeling that perhaps we had more traction on a common concept than we've had in the past," he said. "But, again, that could go away in the first five minutes of the next meeting. It's not something I'm going to get overly jubilant about."
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Approaching common ground? Sunday, April 24, 2005 After almost seven months of fruitless negotiations, there is a sense that the National Hockey League and the NHLPA may be finally approaching some common ground on what a new Collective Bargaining Agreement might look like. Whether that potential common ground may be a path to progress or just another dead end could start to take shape this week. Both sides see positives in the wake of last Monday's meeting in Toronto, but neither side is expressing outright optimism.
"It seemed like we were more on the same page in terms
of an overall framework than we have been throughout
most of this process," NHL chief legal officer Bill Daly
told the Toronto Globe and Mail. "There is a long way to
go and a lot of issues to deal with, but, hopefully,
[at] the next meeting we'll continue to move forward
instead of having to start all over again.
And there was this statement from the NHLPA's Ted Saskin: "While we had good discussions on Monday on some of the issues, it is also clear that we still have a long way to go before we could say any real progress is being made," The two sides are expected to meet again this week as a follow up to last Monday's talks in Toronto. That's where the NHLPA apparently floated the idea of a cap system linked to NHL revenues. It's not the linkage system the league had been proposing, which would have given the players as a whole a set percentage of league revenues. An escrow account would have been used to ensure that percentage was not exceeded. The players' proposal is different in that is no direct link between overall player costs and league revenues. Instead, the players offered to allow the salary cap to move up or down depending on the growth or decline in league revenues. In other words, when projected NHL revenues go up, so does the salary cap. If projected revenues were to go down then the cap would drop as well. It's a different kind of linkage. There have been reports that the NHL considers it a "workable concept." But there is still the issue of the numbers. According to the New York Post, the NHLPA's numbers included a maximum payroll of $42.5 million and a minimum payroll of $24 million. "My sense, overall, was that kind of system
could work," Boston Bruins owner Jeremy Jacobs told the Boston
Globe last week. "The trick is getting that high figure in line,
making it a much tighter spread between the minimum each team
would pay, to the maximum each team would pay. We wanted that
spread to be cut in half." The floor was seen as a weak overture to the PA when it was made. The league's goal all along has been to have a fairly narrow game between the highest and lowest team payrolls. The question now is whether what may be a workable concept can be turned into some workable numbers. The answer to that question may become better known starting this week. |
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