Doing a little pre-negs dance

Ottawa -- Like a couple of gunfighters sizing each other up, NHL commissioner Gary Bettman and NHLPA executive directer Don Fehr are circling and getting closer and closer.

On Saturday afternoon, they were actually in the same room, although not at the same time. Bettman addressed the media and, poof, just minutes after the commissioner slipped out of the Drawing Room at Ottawa's swank Chateau Laurier hotel, in walked Fehr.

The current CBA expires Sept. 15. The last time the two sides went to work on a deal they missed an entire season, so fans are right to be nervous about when talks will get going.

Bettman, who has regular chats with the media, is on record saying he and his team are ready to begin formal talks.

"My guess is, at least informally, we'll have some discussions in the not-too-distant future," Bettman said. "I'm not prepared to say when the formal negotiations will begin. That's a call we've pretty (much) left to the players' association. We're ready, and have been ready.

"But the union has had some work to do. Don Fehr, obviously being somewhat new to the job, is going through a bit of a learning curve and wants to make sure he understands what his constituents want. And so we're patient. I'm not concerned about the time frame."

Fehr says he'd like as many players as possible available to monitor and participate in the sessions. That can be construed as the end of the season sometime in late June.

"There's this view that somehow if you have this big meeting and everyone comes and takes pictures of a dozen or two dozen people sitting around a table like the autoworkers used to do, that somehow magically signifies the kickoff of something in a formal way and that the world is different as between before and after," Fehr said. "That's largely untrue. We'll get to that when the appropriate time is. It doesn't mean there won't be a lot of work, a lot of conversation, a lot of discussion before and on an ongoing basis after that. Don't make more out of it than is there."

Fehr says the union needs a clearer picture of the NHL's finances.

"There's significant information we don't have," he said. "We have overall revenue numbers for almost all things -- that's what HRR (hockey-related revenue) consists of. And we have the player-cost numbers. But we don't have the rest of it."

The NFL and NBA recently went through CBA talks, with the owners taking back a share of league revenues from the salary pie. Bettman has not made public any of his groups' wishes for the next contract.

"My hope is that we can reason together and that collective bargaining will be painless and quiet and quick," Bettman said Saturday. "That would serve everyone's best interest."

Fehr said there's another labour negotiation in pro sports to look at as well.

"I'm simply going to point out there were three negotiations. The third one was baseball," he said. "They went through their third negotiation in a row without a stoppage, the second one without even a hint or suggestion of it, without deadlines being set by anybody."

Fehr was with the baseball players' union for 25 years. Baseball does not have a hard salary cap like the other three major sports.

"Baseball is far and away -- on a labour relations standpoint -- the most stable of the four (major sports). There's no question about it at this stage. So if you're going to look for role models of what you might want to emulate... I'm suggesting not to eliminate it from the analysis," he said. "It's easy to say they did this in football, they did this in basketball. Gary came from basketball, so obviously that's what he's going to do... The negotiations are self-contained. The ownership is different, the nature of the sport is different, the economics of the four sports are different. We use the same words like free agency, arbitration, revenue-sharing, but they don't mean the same thing between sport to sport or even contract to contract. So let's be a little careful."

Fehr is reluctant to get into specifics about the upcoming talks and speculation about the NHL wanting to strip the players' revenue share from 57 per cent to closer to the 50 per cent mark.

"From my own standpoint? Obviously, I hope we don't go down that road, because we saw what happened in the other sports," Fehr said, referring to the lockouts endured in the NFL and NBA this past year.

gary.lawless@freepress.mb.ca

Gary Lawless, Winnipeg Free Press

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition January 29, 2012 B3