The NHL and NHLPA will get back to the negotiating table less than a week after their bizarre breaking off of talks last Thursday in New York City. The sides, which have remained in contact, have set up a meeting for Wednesday, as reported by numerous outlets, including ESPN.com's Pierre LeBrun.
As of yet no location has been announced, which is probably for the better. Seeing how the two sides handled themselves last time the media knew where they were and cameres were present, we had Commissioner Gary Bettman going on a near 45-minute rant, for wont of a better word, about the negotiations and the union's role in them.
While an undisclosed location means lack of information for us hockey fans who continue to be left out in the cold with no games, the positive trade-off is that hopefully there will be no poisoning of the talks through the spin departments.
The best bet is that the meetings will not be in New York, though. The "secret location" in Manhattan was discovered almost instantly before.
But where they're meeting doesn't really matter. What does matter is what will be discussed and the fact that they are even going to discuss it after how things ended.
When we last left off, Donald Fehr was saying how the two sides had pretty much reached an agreement on the financial aspects of a new CBA while getting closer on other details like contract term limits. That's what prompted Bettman to get in front of the media and say it was irresponsible of Fehr to suggest they were close and get fans' hopes up because it's not the case. The most recent offer from the owners was now off the table.
If we were to accept that threat then it would prove very difficult moving forward of getting a deal done. While the owners might have been supremely frustrated, it doesn't seem very logical that they would blow up a potential deal when they were getting so close. The Make Whole, or transition payments, haven't always been the favorite idea of owners but if they want to play some hockey this season then that offer needs to stay on the table.
In other words, you can assume -- although there is no guarantee -- that the offer will come back on the table, especially after the players dropped another one of their demands in their most recent proposal. That was the demand which the owners were not keen on, one that said the players' share of revenue would not go down from year to year in a fixed dollar amount, not a percentage amount. So if one year the revenue pot was $3.6 billion and the next year it was $3.4 billion then the players would receive the same amount of money in the second year as they did the first, breaking from a true 50/50 split. But according to Nick Cotsonika of Yahoo!, that's no longer a demand of theirs.
What the discussion will be is a mystery, but we do have a better idea of who will be present. On the NHL's side there were six owners in the room during last week's negotiations in New York. This time there are likely to be zero as Deputy Commissioner Bill Daly told Pat Leonard of the New York Daily News.
"I don't anticipate any owners participating in our next meeting," Daly said.
As usual, there don't appear to be any restrictions on which players might attend, though. The union has encouraged players to come to the meetings and the NHL hasn't tried to tell the union no on that front, a word that has otherwise been pretty prominent in their vocabulary.
After the NHL canceled another round of games through Dec. 30 on Monday, bringing the count to 526 games (plus the Winter Classic on Jan. 1), the pressure is really building for the sides to get back together and hammer out a deal. Bettman has said that while there is no supposed Drop Dead date, anything less than a 48-game schedule would be a no-go and to reach that goal you figure a deal would have to be in place within the next four weeks. There's still time, but they need to get working.
Wednesday's meeting is a start.
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