Players lose it all after union chief hedges bet

NHL owners, of course, aren't blameless in all this. They drove up salaries without a gun to their head over the 10 years of the last CBA, and they extended the contract twice during its term for the sake of expediency. Had they dropped the demand for linking salaries to revenues a long time ago, they might have managed to bypass this mess.

But even without a link, there was no real option when it came to getting the cost certainty that a salary cap represents, no matter how much Goodenow insisted there was.

"Look, the owners created this situation, but I've owned a (minor-league) team, and in that position, you always want to know your bottom line," Dionne said. "I understand players worry about (accounting) creativity, but at the end of the day, the guy who writes the checks has to do what's right for his business."

The league tried at the end in a last-gasp effort to avoid journeying into the unknown, giving Goodenow a face-saving mechanism by raising the cap level to $44.5 million on their final take-it-or-leave offer, a figure that was already about 40 percent higher than what the owners had been aiming for when they locked out their employees last September.

"That was as far as we could go, and even that was stretching it," said NHL commissioner Gary Bettman.

But it was not far enough for Goodenow, who felt compelled to make one last attempt at drawing blood from a stone by counter-proposing a cap of $49.5 million, with limited leeway to allow teams to exceed even that figure.

It didn't work, and as the players will start to realize, neither does Goodenow's leadership anymore.