NHL Labor Talks Go Nowhere Again

The NHL labor talks continued Tuesday, with plenty of talk, but no progress, as a 5 1/2 -hour meeting in New York only served to move the two sides closer to a lockout.

NHL Players’ Assn. officials reiterated that the six concepts proposed by the league in July were unacceptable, saying each involved a salary cap, and focused discussion Tuesday on individual team operations.

The two sides will meet Aug. 25 and 26 in Ottawa with follow-up meetings Aug. 31 and Sept. 1 in Montreal. Ted Saskin, the senior director of the union, indicated Tuesday’s talks could be the basis of a union proposal in the future.

“You can’t fashion a proposal in a vacuum,” Saskin said. “You have to have some common understanding about the issues and concerns.

“We don’t think that just throwing proposals out there is necessarily going to advance the process. We need to get to a common understanding and find some common ground and that’s really what we’re trying to do with the dialogue that was undertaken today.”

Saskin also said “we made it clear that the six concepts [proposed in July] didn’t hold any promise to leading to agreement and suggested this way to get some dialogue going and find areas we agree and disagree on.”

The team discussions were general and included attendance and marketing, Saskin said. Both sides said they were willing to meet daily to move toward an agreement.

“I would hope there was a purpose of our dialogue,” said Bill Daly, the NHL’s executive vice president and chief legal officer. “Perhaps use it for a new proposal.

“We made no progress toward a solution [today]. Did we have good dialogue? Yes. But we were talking more about issues instead of solutions. ... I am more and more concerned as the days flip by on the calendar and we are no closer to a resolution.”

The current collective bargaining agreement will expire Sept. 15 and there are growing expectations that a lengthy lockout that could wipe out the 2004-05 season will follow. The lockout in 1994-95 lasted 103 days.

On July 21, the NHL offered six possible concepts to the union for a new economic system and Saskin requested more information. Any hopes for a breakthrough were dashed when, at an Aug. 4 meeting, union officials said that each proposal included a salary cap.

“The union today formally rejected the six concept proposals we had made,” Daly said. “So we spent today talking about league and team operations and economics. They told us they wanted to get a better sense of what was going on around the league and how the system impacted those things.”

Last October, the union proposed a system that included a luxury tax, revenue sharing, lowering entry-level contracts and a one-time 5% rollback in salaries and some changes to the entry-level system. The league rejected the plan.