The NHL and NHL Player's Association held their longest meeting yet but remain as far apart as ever on a solution to their labour impasse.
``Unfortunately it doesn't mean a whole lot at this point,'' Bill Daly, the NHL's chief legal officer, said of the 5½-hour meeting in Newark, N.J.
``Today could be characterized as a side-step in the process,'' said NHLPA senior director Ted Saskin.
The two sides did schedule four more meetings: Aug. 25-26 in Ottawa and Aug. 31-Sept. 1 in Montreal. The current collective bargaining agreement expires Sept. 15.
``Time is short at this point and we need to start making progress,'' Daly said on the phone Tuesday evening. ``The fact of the matter is, after today's session, we're no closer to a solution, and that's worrisome.''
The NHL feels it pressed the issue in a bargaining session July 21 by introducing six new ideas for a new system but the NHLPA translated all six as salary cap mechanisms - something the union says it will never accept.
``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.
``So we had a full five-hour dialogue on that.''
The onus is now on the NHLPA executive director Bob Goodenow and his team to counter with a proposal of their own although that may not happen next Wednesday in Ottawa.
``At the appropriate time we will be making a proposal but I just don't want to say that it will be at a particular meeting,'' Saskin said Tuesday evening on conference call.
``We don't think that just throwing proposals out there is necessarily going to advance the process,'' Saskin added. ``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.
``So hopefully we can put together proposals that address the issues in a meaningful way.''
The NHLPA did propose a system back on Oct. 1 that included a luxury tax, revenue sharing, a one-time five per cent rollback in salaries and some changes to the entry-level system.
The union's luxury tax proposal would have seen more than half of the league's 30 clubs pay up in 2003-04, the threshold being a $40-million US payroll.
It's a luxury tax that would have more teeth than Major League Baseball's, where only the New York Yankees paid up in 2003.
``I still think that's a framework that addresses the issues but at this point they've shown no interest in that,'' said Saskin.
League commissioner Gary Bettman said Aug. 4 he had absolutely no interest in a luxury tax.
Owners appear ready to fight long and hard for a system that guarantees them cost control, having put aside more than $300 million US in case of a lockout.
The league was obviously disappointed the union rejected all six of their proposals Tuesday.
``We've come forward with what we think are six creative ideas,'' Daly said. ``They've now rejected those. Now I think we need to hear what they have to say and what their potential solutions are. We still believe that the six proposals we made are the best way to resolve this.''
Forget the six league proposals, says Saskin, they'll never see the light of day.
``We've always said the six concepts they floated out were non-starters but we wanted to fully understand them (before rejected them),'' Saskin said. ``Now we want to continue the dialogue and hopefully canvass areas that can lead us to an agreement.''
The league insists controlling costs is the only way to bring balance and a level playing field for all 30 NHL clubs.
The NHLPA counters with the fact that 12 different clubs have reached the conference finals over the last three years, and small-market clubs such as Calgary, Anaheim and Carolina have reached the Cup final.
The current collective agreement, twice renewed over the last 10 years, has seen salaries grow from an average of $733,000 US in 1994-95 to $1.83 million in 2003-04. And despite league-wide revenues that have risen at the same pace, the league says it lost just under $300 million in 2002-03.
But the spectre of a lockout has seen NHL clubs act more responsibility in the last two years, particularly on the free-agent market, which the NHLPA feels is proof a salary cap isn't needed.
But the NHL wants a new labour agreement that guarantees costs won't overrun revenues. The union says the league's proposals, no matter how worded, amount to a hard salary cap.
The league says that 75 per cent of total revenues in 2002-03 went to player costs, leaving only 25 per cent to pay for coaches, travel, building costs, marketing and advertising - not enough to make any money in the NHL's eyes.
So the league is adamant it wants a new system that guarantees a link between costs and revenues.
The two sides have met three times in the last six weeks and will now increase their meetings as the clock ticks towards Sept. 15.
``We told that NHLPA we would make ourselves available every day from here on in to get this thing resolved,'' Daly said.