End Game has reached Dead End.
Optimism vanished as quickly as it arose last night. Negotiations in the NHL lockout broke off without further discussions being scheduled.
Making another “last” bid last night to save the hockey season, the NHL is believed to have offered the Players Association yet another version of a hard salary cap. The players have vowed never to accept a hard cap and apparently remained true to that promise.
“We continue to have significant philosophical differences,” PA senior director Ted Saskin said after last night’s meeting in New York. “No meetings are scheduled.”
The talks moved from Toronto Wednesday to New York last night for the 11th-hour bargaining, raising hopes that the change of venue would result in a change of mind. Talks were expected to continue today, but those hopes were scuttled last night.
The league is said to have presented a hard cap scheme in which different teams would have different payroll ceilings, depending on team revenue and other factors. Another plan that the league was said to be considering would set three tiers: a minimum payroll, a level at which a luxury tax kicks in, and a hard cap in the $40-$50 million range.
With time all but gone, the league is believed to figure that a 30-game intraconference schedule starting around Valentine’s Day is the most it could manage if its scheme was adopted immediately.
The Players Association was said to have steeled itself for another proposal involving a hard cap. There were suggestions earlier in the day that such a proposal would not be viewed favorably by the players, whose offer to roll back 24 percent of their pay was rejected by the league last month.
Sources among the PA doubt the league will announce the cancellation of the season until an unannounced deadline has passed early next month. And they don’t forsee the league moving further towards the players’ pay-cut, luxury-tax offer of last month.
Union president Trevor Linden told his players that the talks in Toronto produced next-to-nothing towards ending the owners’ lockout that began Sept. 15 with the expiration of the last CBA.