Last Chance became New Day, keeping alive the faintest flicker of hope for an NHL season.
NHL commissioner Gary Bettman and Players Assn. head Bob Goodenow will resume their last-ditch negotiations here today, after nine hours of collective bargaining last night.
Nothing more concrete than their return to the table today renewed optimism that they might avert the launching of legal hostilities that would make the NHL lockout look like happy days.
They are chasing an improbable breakthrough as they face the imminent scrapping of the season, perhaps as early as today.
It appears that one side will have to virtually capitulate to keep the NHL from giving itself yet another black eye, one that could be fatal. The NHL stands on the verge of becoming the first major pro sport to cancel a full season.
With the owners previously only willing to discuss a hard salary cap, and the players willing to discuss anything but, hope had virtually vanished for any sort of season. Disappearing, too, was the 2005 Stanley Cup playoffs this spring. Only in 1919, due to the influenza epidemic, was the 1893 Cup not awarded.
Facing failure and humiliation on an historical scale, the opposing leaders yesterday met directly for the first time since mid-December, when the owners were rejecting the union’s stunning 24-percent salary rollback offer. They began discussions yesterday at 1:30 p.m. and continued until nearly 10:30.
There were two trains of thought on the lengthy talks. The sides may have been performing their required “due diligence” in going over and over every issue exhaustively, so that a labor judge can’t fault their negotiations. Or one side may have decided to take the best deal it could get at this last possible moment.
The return of Bettman and Goodenow to the talks signaled that time had virtually expired. Both sat out the second-level talks of the past two weeks, when the owners presented more variations on the hard salary cap theme that the union insisted it will never accept.
If the season is canceled, the owners are likely to declare impasse and seek to impose their salary cap plan on the sport for next season. Such a move would certainly bring an immediate court challenge by the union, since a management-imposed lid on salaries among competing teams would be illegal if not collectively bargained, unless court-allowed.
Bettman barely had his new NHL commissioner business cards printed up before he launched his first lockout in 1994. In what then appeared to be a sacrifice by the players, the sides agreed on the recently-lapsed CBA to allow a 48-game slate to be played in 1995, starting Jan. 20.
Since then, Bettman has rued allowing that season to proceed without achieving the salary cap that has been the supposed reason he came to hockey from the NBA, the NHL’s most direct competitor and the league most likely to benefit from his ice lockouts.
In recent years, Bettman has said that he should have scuttled that 1995 season rather than take that deal, which turned into a players’ bonanza because owners couldn’t restrain themselves from buying high-priced free agents.