With an NHL board of governors' meeting just a week and a half away, both sides in the NHL's labour battle said Tuesday that nothing is in the works to help kick-start talks.
Rumours surfaced at the world junior hockey championship in North Dakota that a new offer may come from either side before the Jan. 14 NHL board meeting in New York, but both the NHL and NHL Players' Association deny that.
"We are not working on anything," NHLPA senior director Ted Saskin said Tuesday. "It is very clear to us that if there is going to be any hope of a season, the NHL is going to have to show some interest in getting into a meaningful negotiation and it's very clear that what they presented to us on Dec. 14 provided no basis for further negotiation."
Bill Daly, the NHL's executive vice-president and chief legal officer, also denied the league was working on a new offer.
"There is nothing to the story that we're working on a new proposal," Daly said in an e-mail.
There are no plans for any meetings between the two sides at this point, which raises the question of what will happen when the league's 30 owners meet Jan. 14. The last time the board of governors met was Sept. 14, when league commissioner Gary Bettman announced the lockout.
The NHL has not yet finalized the agenda for the Jan. 14 meeting, waiting to see what transpires in the next 10 days. The speculation on what will happen Jan. 14 centres around three possibilities:
- Bettman comes out and says he's got the full support of all owners on achieving "cost certainty," no matter how long it takes, but does not announce a drop-dead date or the cancellation of the season, leaving everyone hanging for the remainder of the year;
- Bettman announces the cancellation of the 2004-05 season;
- Bettman announces a drop-dead date for a new deal to be struck to save the season.
The two sides haven't met since Dec. 14 in Toronto when the league rejected the union's offer, highlighted by a 24 per cent salary rollback on all existing player contracts, and the NHLPA firmly rejected the NHL's counter-proposal - which included a salary cap.
Through Tuesday, 555 of the season's 1,230 games have gone by the wayside.