Deadline No Help to NHL Stalemate

Despite NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman’s directive that a labor agreement must be on paper by the end of this weekend or he will cancel the season, the two sides spent Friday trading barbs, not ideas to end the lockout. No talks took place and no meetings are planned.

“We’re standing on the edge of the cliff and there’s a strong gust of wind behind us now,” said Al Coates, general manager of the Mighty Ducks.

Bill Daly, the NHL’s chief legal officer, said via e-mail the league was willing to revive the proposal it made Wednesday, in which it agreed to operate under the luxury tax-based system the union proposed on Dec. 9 until four “trigger points” were reached, when the system would switch to a salary cap linked to revenues. The union rejected the plan, saying the trigger point of three clubs having payrolls of $42 million or more would kick in immediately.

“Unfortunately, this has never been a true negotiation,” Daly said. “There are no plans for talks or for reaching out to the union. At some point you just have to realize what their objective has been and continues to be, to force the cancellation of the season.”

The union said it wouldn’t initiate talks.

“They’re now saying why didn’t we negotiate the trigger points?” Ted Saskin, the union’s executive director, told Canada’s TSN network. “Well, you have to have trigger points that relate to whether our Dec. 9 framework was working or not. And what they put out as trigger points was the replicated effects of their cap system, which clearly is not what we were trying to achieve.... I think they understood that and are now just trying to spin it from a PR perspective.”

Daly said he expected an announcement on the fate of the season “early next week.” He said Bettman would call a meeting of the Board of Governors after the announcement; Bettman doesn’t need their approval to cancel the season.

Coates said the Ducks would lose less money by not playing than by playing, “a little bit of a sad commentary.” He also said the club hadn’t lost any sponsors during the lockout and had kept 78% of its 8,000 season-ticket holders.

“What’s changed, from a business standpoint, is we aren’t able to continue some of the things we’d planned to take another step forward,” he said.