Making the Complex Simple

School’s out for the summer, but NHL players, club executives and agents are about to take crash courses in the economics of a collective bargaining agreement that will transform the way they do business.

Starting today, management personnel from every club will gather in New York to go through the 600-page document with Bill Daly, the NHL’s chief legal officer. Don Meehan, a prominent agent, said player representatives will get copies of the deal on Tuesday and a rank-and-file vote will be held Wednesday and Thursday. Some players will cast ballots in Toronto, but others will vote on the union’s website.

Agents will get copies next Thursday at a union-led seminar in Toronto. Despite the deal’s complexity, Meehan didn’t anticipate needing much study time. “A day or so. It won’t take that long,” he said. The NHL and the union on Wednesday said they’d agreed in principle on a new deal, signaling the last gasp of the lockout imposed on Sept. 15 by Commissioner Gary Bettman. Ratification requires majority approval of the 700-member union and the 30 voters on the NHL’s Board of Governors.

The governors will meet Thursday in New York. If they approve, as expected, Bettman will hold a news conference to announce the end of the lockout and the adoption of rule changes intended to boost offense. The draft lottery is scheduled the same day.

Neither the NHL nor the union will confirm details of the six-year deal, but many aspects have filtered out through sources and the media. It will have a salary cap at about $37 million and a floor at about $24 million; a stipulation that salaries can’t exceed 54% of league revenues in the first season, with provisions for adjustment later as revenues rise or fall; a 24% rollback in existing contracts and qualifying offers; a rule that no player can earn more than 20% of the league salary-cap figure, and unrestricted free agency as soon as age 27 in 2008.

It looms as a strange new world for the NHL. But investment banker Gordon Saint-Denis, who has arranged financing and valuations for NHL franchises and assisted owners in purchasing and selling franchises, said the new deal will produce fiscal and competitive benefits.

“It definitely improves the economic playing field across the board,” said Saint-Denis, a Montreal native who heads the sports advisory and finance unit of New York-based CIT. “Smaller teams will have the chance to be more profitable. Payrolls won’t be forced up by small-market teams trying to keep up with the big-market teams. It’s going to give the league a lot more in the way of economic parity, which is what the NHL needed and what it had envisioned for this new CBA.”

Many teams will have to scramble to get under the cap, creating a flurry of action.

“The next two or three months, you’re going to see a huge redistribution of talent,” Saint-Denis said. “You’ll see some teams that hadn’t been able to sign big-name players be able to sign them. These small-market teams can show the fans, ‘Hey, this is what we were working for with this CBA. We’ve got big-name players here.’ ”

Looser free agency will allow a young star like Columbus’ Rick Nash to move on while in his prime. However, Saint-Denis said salary controls will prevent the bidding wars that formerly forced small-market teams to relinquish talented players they’d developed.

“Under the old agreement, a player like that, there’s no way a team could keep him. He’d want a lot of money and he’d go to a big-market team,” Saint-Denis said. “Under the new model there’s a greater probability of keeping him. There’s a ceiling everyone has to address.”

Saint-Denis said he anticipates a quick rebound of fan interest in Canada and in U.S. teams in Detroit and Minnesota but said smaller markets “will have to work a little harder.”

Ian Laperriere, the scrappy former King forward, agreed.

“I don’t think there will be a problem in L.A., but markets like Nashville and Carolina worry me,” Laperriere said. “We have to work hand in hand with the owners. It’s going to be tough because of some of the bad feelings from the past year. We have to put that behind us. The more money the owners make, the more money the players will make.”

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Times staff writer Chris Foster contributed to this report.