NHL, Players’ Union Reject New Proposals

The NHL and the players’ union exchanged insults and accusations Tuesday and made no progress toward a new labor deal, chilling their relations as the league’s lockout of players reached the three-month mark.

In their second meeting in six days, the NHL rejected a union proposal centered on a 24% salary rollback and a luxury tax triggered at $45 million. The union, in turn, rejected a counterproposal by the NHL to set salaries at 54% of revenue because it sees a salary cap as an unacceptable restriction of the marketplace.

No new talks are planned. Through Tuesday, 414 games and the All-Star game have been wiped out.

“If I’ve played my last game, it’s something I can live with,” veteran forward Trevor Linden, president of the NHL Players’ Assn., said Tuesday.

“I love to play, I love the game, but I’m not going to sacrifice my beliefs.”

King forward Trent Klatt, a member of the union negotiating committee, said he was pessimistic about saving the season.

“I would tell players to go to Europe. I would tell players to go back to school or take up entrepreneurial goals,” he said. “If there’s a compromise between a salary cap and a luxury tax, right now I don’t know where it is.”

Commissioner Gary Bettman praised the salary rollback as confirmation “of the magnitude or our losses and the accuracy of our financial reporting.” His counterproposal included a graduated rollback that wouldn’t have affected salaries of players earning $800,000 or less but would have cut salaries of those earning $4 million to $4.99 million by 30% and those earning $5 million or more by 35%.

Bettman said other provisions of the union’s proposal, such as reducing entry-level salaries and restructuring arbitration rights, wouldn’t curb the forces that lifted the average salary to $1.8 million last season and led to $1 billion in losses over 10 years under the previous collective bargaining agreement.

His counteroffer eliminated arbitration and reduced the age for unrestricted free agency from 31 to 30 but did not contain a luxury tax. He said the NHL would never agree to a luxury tax “at any level or any threshold,” because it’s “meaningless” and unpredictable.

“If you accept everything the union says will result from this proposal, the players will receive 56.6% of our revenues on Day 1 of the new agreement,” Bettman said at a news conference at the Air Canada Centre. “We countered with 54%. We should be able to reach an agreement because, after all, this should be about money.

“So if we cannot make an agreement, with such a modest gap to bridge, it must be because the union does not believe its proposed system will actually reduce costs to the 56.6% level and keep them there. Rather, the result, or perhaps the union’s hope, will be the resumption of the inflationary spiral.”

Bob Goodenow, the union’s executive director, said Bettman misinterpreted the rollback offer and understated the savings of the proposal. The 24% “was simply a number to reset the dial” and “not at all an acknowledgment or vindication” of figures showing player costs consumed 76% of league revenue last season.

The NHL’s arguments were “wildly unreliable, using an assortment of mostly made-up numbers and a variety of different time periods,” Goodenow said. “I can tell you these projections are completely useless and phony.

“Furthermore and importantly, they offered no real revenue sharing among clubs. In short, the league took what they liked from our proposal, made major changes and slapped a salary cap on top of it. Put simply, our proposal provides the basis for a negotiated agreement, but the NHL’s does not.”

Bill Guerin of the Dallas Stars, who said owners seemed more united behind Bettman than during the lockout that curtailed the 1994-95 season, said the NHL has experienced “a consistent decline” since 1994 and hinted Bettman was to blame.

“It’s never one man, but he’s running it,” Guerin said.

Mighty Duck forward Steve Rucchin, who was updated on the 3 1/2 -hour talks via a conference call, said he believed Bettman might ultimately try to declare an impasse and impose labor conditions next season. Such an effort would be complicated by varying labor laws in the U.S. and Canadian provinces.

“I’m keeping my fingers crossed that it doesn’t come to that,” Rucchin said.

“I hope people realize this was never a negotiation, as Mr. Bettman claimed. It is more the league trying to dictate.... I look back at the beginning of the lockout and remember that Mr. Bettman said the players don’t want to play, they want a lockout. That shows me that their mandate was to probably not have a season, knowing that we were not going to discuss salary caps.”

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Times staff writer Chris Foster contributed to this report.