2012 CBA Negotiations Thread

[Redleaf]

Just dropping in on my daily check of this thread to let you all know how much I don't care anymore.  Nope, don't care, nope.

If you really don't care, don't post about it. Just don't care.

 

[rdowdall]

Well I'm shocked that mediation didn't resolve anything. Shocked, I say.

Shocked and appalled?

Shocked and/or appalled.

 

[Bender]

http://m.thestar.com/sports/hockey/nhl/article/1296720--nhl-lockout-nhlpa-united-in-its-distrust-of-owners-cox

Not bad of an article methinks.

 

[Kin]

http://m.thestar.com/sports/hockey/nhl/article/1296720--nhl-lockout-nhlpa-united-in-its-distrust-of-owners-cox

Not bad of an article methinks.

I think it's Cox at his absolute worst. It's rife with strawman arguments and simplistic arguments that have way more to do with his own agenda than it does with anything that's actually going on.

Fast forward to 2012. NHL players have never been as rich as they are now, or were under the previous collective bargaining agreement. During Gary Bettman?s reign as NHL commissioner, their salaries have increased more than five-fold.

For that, Bettman is almost universally hated by the players.

Yeah. That's why the players don't like him. It's because their salaries have gone up. I get that he's trying to point out that there's an incongruity between the bad opinion players have of Bettman and the growth of the average player salary during his tenure but aside from the fact it's an specious argument(during Alan Eagleson's tenure as Executive Director of the NHLPA salaries increased by at least twenty-fold. Should players not hate him?) it's presented in a way to make the players look like absolute morons. It'd be fine to debunk the actual reasons players say they don't like Bettman but that's not what this is.

In recent weeks, Boston Bruins owner Jeremy Jacobs has become the focal point of the union?s spite. Before, it was Bettman accused of restraining the majority of good-willed owners and using voting rules to keep a minority in charge. Now, Jacobs has joined the commish in the minds of the players, ostensibly as the hardest of the hard-line owners, a individual who cannot be reasoned with because of his unbridled greed and disrespect for the hockey union.

At least that?s what the brethren believe. Forget the $34 million Jacobs lavished on Tyler Seguin for no particular reasonjust before the lockout began, about as anti-Bettman a move as an owner could make.

Don?t confuse the the effort to create PA unity by introducing facts.

Yeah, no particular reason. It's not like that's what Seguin is worth or that giving big extensions to good young players is seemingly a widespread practice and that by not doing so, Jacobs risked angering Seguin much in the way he did Phil Kessel and losing him either now or as a UFA. No, it's a contract he lavished upon Seguin because he's just such a generous soul.

I think that's the prime load of BS that Cox is full of with this article. Leaving aside the fact that "players" are not some mass entity who are going to think of themselves or their salaries collectively all the time or through the ages, players certainly aren't going to attribute their salaries to the owners generosity. Players believe, correctly for what it's worth, that the reason they're well paid and the reason that player salaries have grown five-fold in the last 20 years is because of what they've done. Or, if not themselves, that it's because of what Joe Sakic and Mario Lemieux and Dominik Hasek did to grow the game. Players believe, again correctly, that what they do creates a tremendous amount of value and that their pay reflects that. It's not the owner's largesse that made them millionaires.

Does Gary Bettman deserve some of the credit for the growth of the game? Sure. But as much as players? No. Enough so that he is directly responsible for the way their pay has increased.

Now it?s Bettman and Jacobs. We didn?t really have this during the Goodenow years...

Wow, really? Because as someone who lived through the 04-05 lockout I can say pretty firmly that news at the time was that Goodenow and Bettman hated each other and that was a significant impediment to getting a deal done.

This is what the players seem to now believe, or what their propagandists are trying to convince them of.

...

Give Fehr credit. In a take-back scenario, he didn?t have a lot of cards to play. All he could really do was find a way to make the players believe this was about their manhood, about standing up to the owners, about making amends for turning on one another in the last lockout.

To have any cards to play in this negotiation, Fehr needed to rally the players around the concept that despite the fact salaries had increased substantially since the last lockout, the 2005 CBA was their Treaty of Versailles. This required some finesse. Fehr, rather than working on a new deal, talked from the start about the massive give-backs of that CBA, and the vital need not to capitulate again.

He needed to make this negotiation about the past, not the future.

The best way to achieve that goal was to unite the players behind a secondary idea, the idea that the owners were and are lying to them at every turn, that they won?t bargain fairly, that the players are giving and giving more and more not getting anything in return, that Bettman and Jacobs and the rest of them are trying to take food off the table of today?s player and the player of the future.

This to me is just a staggering amount of garbage and pure, straight from the owners. It's been the same tactic owners have taken since sports labour negotiations started. Oh, it's not the players who are upset. It's not the players who want changes. It's the sneaky union leaders and their self-aggrandizing ways and, by the way, have you noticed how they earn a pretty penny? The players, no, they're just poor souls duped by Donald Fehr and his moustache twirling. They've bought what he's selling, boy howdy.

It's just staggering in it's idiocy, contradicted by what Cox himself points out earlier in the article. We have access to player's opinions in their purest forms these days. Players are upset with the league. Players are upset with Bettman. Fehr didn't orchestrate this to fulfill a personal agenda. Every time Fehr, or anyone associated with the MLBPA during it's crazy success, is asked about it they say the same thing. If it's a position the players can stand behind, it'll hold. If not, it doesn't work. If anyone out there thinks that what Donald Fehr cares about is "winning" then they'd have to think the position of the PA is one the players are directing.

I actually think Cox has been better in recent years so it's a little sad to see how full of crap this is. Just complete and total pro-owner nonsense.

 

[Corn Flake]

Good to see the players hanging on for the worst deal possible.

I hope they never accept a cap.

Said others... in 2004.

 

[Corn Flake]

• Any sense of satisfaction I'd get out of watching the Leaf's pathetic attempt at making the playoffs is vastly over shadowed by the satisfaction that the players and the league are losing money.  Every time I hear the negotiations didn't worked, it's music to my ears.  Screw the NHL.
  
  I keep hearing about the league's proposal or the PA's proposal.  How about a fan's proposal?
  

  • Limit of $25 a ticket.
  • Limit of $5 for a beer.
  • During home games, players must make themselves available for two hours to sign autographs for their fans.
  • Player salaries to be between $1,000,000 to $250,000.
  • No instigator rule.
  • Immediate 3 game ban for swearing, insulting, or acting in a manner not suitable for kids.

  [*]Percentage of profit to be split based on player's stats.

Heck, the last tickets I bought to the local junior team cost me $25 and the beer was certainly more than 5 bucks.

The excuse for why beer is so expensive is because if it really was only $5 per, the entire place would be bombed by halfway though the 2nd period.

Remember when the Jays had toonie Tuesdays a few years ago and they had major problems with drunken fans?  Yeah...

 

[Corn Flake]

I think if the owners plan out their pitch well today they could score a major win.  They've badly wanted to get around Fehr and directly to the players since day one... this was a pretty shrewd move to get that chance. Fehr had no choice but to agree to this. Doubly good for the owners is that Bettman .. the person the players despise the most.. won't be in the room.

Buzz Hargrove seems to agree:

http://www.thestar.com/sports/hockey/nhl/article/1296909--nhl-lockout-mistake-for-players-to-meet-owners-one-on-one-buzz-hargrove-says

If I were the owners, after sweet talking the players for a while today, I would be throwing one seriously sweet bone on the table at some key point in the proceedings... like another $100 million to make whole or something plus a few other small bones.. and ask in exchange they drop their demands for a percentage that never decreases and whatever ridiculous clauses Fehr threw in the last PA offer.

I don't think today solves the thing but if the owners talk a language the players can understand and pitch this right they could score a big win for themselves and get this thing moving

 

[Kin]

If I were the owners, after sweet talking the players for a while today, I would be throwing one seriously sweet bone on the table at some key point in the proceedings... like another $100 million to make whole or something plus a few other small bones.. and ask in exchange they drop their demands for a percentage that never decreases and whatever ridiculous clauses Fehr threw in the last PA offer.

I don't think today solves the thing but if the owners talk a language the players can understand and pitch this right they could score a big win for themselves and get this thing moving

I wouldn't make today's meeting out to be something it's not. No matter how persuasive these owners may be, they're still only talking to a handful of players who aren't really empowered to drop any parts of their PA's latest proposal on their own. Steve Fehr and Bill Daly are still going to be on hand. Both sides are still going to have to take whatever is in that meeting and bring it back to their respective groups at large before anything gets done.

This is much ado about nothing. A photo op and an attempt to push the needle.

 

[Corn Flake]

If I were the owners, after sweet talking the players for a while today, I would be throwing one seriously sweet bone on the table at some key point in the proceedings... like another $100 million to make whole or something plus a few other small bones.. and ask in exchange they drop their demands for a percentage that never decreases and whatever ridiculous clauses Fehr threw in the last PA offer.

I don't think today solves the thing but if the owners talk a language the players can understand and pitch this right they could score a big win for themselves and get this thing moving

I wouldn't make today's meeting out to be something it's not. No matter how persuasive these owners may be, they're still only talking to a handful of players who aren't really empowered to drop any parts of their PA's latest proposal on their own. Steve Fehr and Bill Daly are still going to be on hand. Both sides are still going to have to take whatever is in that meeting and bring it back to their respective groups at large before anything gets done.

This is much ado about nothing. A photo op and an attempt to push the needle.

Probably .. but I think the owners are going to come to the table with thoughts of this being their big chance to deliver a message without the Fehr filter, and to maximize that chance, throw a big bone on the table to boot. 

If the owners played this out as best they can, IMO they drop something like another $100 mil in the make whole pot BUT do so in a proposed exchange for removing some of the goofy clauses the PA asked for in their last deal.  Sure it will probably be a long list of clauses, but it would be an actual negotiation of points vs. throwing proposals over the wall like they have.

I would assume the PA is going to send in some of their more "brighter minded" players, so it's not like the owners are going to be sitting across from some of the dimmer bulbs like Paul Bissonnette ... which to me gives this a fighting chance of at least being the spark.  And still, a bit of a good cop / feel nice session is possibly what is badly needed here.  Fehr and Bettman are anything but touchy feely guys.

You could very well be bang on that this is nothing more than a photo op but really think the owners see this as a big time opening for them.  Whether they use it properly is the big question.

 

[Redleaf]

I enjoyed this....

Check out the photo of Jacobs.

http://www.downgoesbrown.com/2012/12/nhl-lockout-players-owners-meeting.html

 

[Bullfrog]

The excuse for why beer is so expensive is because if it really was only $5 per, the entire place would be bombed by halfway though the 2nd period.

Remember when the Jays had toonie Tuesdays a few years ago and they had major problems with drunken fans?  Yeah...

Well, it's either that or raise ticket prices. It's the same issue in movie theatres. Everyone knows -- and complains about -- the price of concessions, particularly pop and popcorn. Of course that bag of popcorn that you paid $8 for is only worth 10c. But somebody's paying for Brad Pitt's $25M fee. It's either pay for expensive popcorn, or they raise ticket prices, which wouldn't work as it'd keep more people home. This means less impulse buying, upselling, etc.

I'm obviously oversimplifying it, but similar in concept.

 

[Kin]

Probably .. but I think the owners are going to come to the table with thoughts of this being their big chance to deliver a message without the Fehr filter, and to maximize that chance, throw a big bone on the table to boot. 

If the owners played this out as best they can, IMO they drop something like another $100 mil in the make whole pot BUT do so in a proposed exchange for removing some of the goofy clauses the PA asked for in their last deal.  Sure it will probably be a long list of clauses, but it would be an actual negotiation of points vs. throwing proposals over the wall like they have.

I don't necessarily disagree that the owners might think that this is some sort of masterstroke or opportunity on their part, I just question the reality of that perspective. The five or six guys from the PA who are in that room aren't going to be negotiating, not in a broad sense and especially not on the finer points. They don't have the authority do so in a meaningful way and I think engaging them on that level is a dead end.

There's the opportunity to start a dialog, maybe even mend some of the bad feelings, but if the owners come in and start talking specific points on the CBA I think the players, especially if they are the brighter ones in the PA, are going to be aware of the fact that theyaren't qualified or authorized to be hashing it out and will pretty quickly say "If we're going to be negotiating, we'll bring back the guy we hired to do that for us".

So I see what you're saying but from my perspective if the owners try to use this as an opportunity to try and split the ranks and go around Fehr, I think they'll widen that chasm of bad feelings.

 

[bustaheims]

NHLPA: 18 Players are in NYC for CBA meetings with owners today. All in attendance will be taking part in the meetings. http://t.co/YOg8np4m

Too many cooks . . .

 

[Corn Flake]

So I see what you're saying but from my perspective if the owners try to use this as an opportunity to try and split the ranks and go around Fehr, I think they'll widen that chasm of bad feelings.

I don't think they would attempt to do that.. at least not in any direct kind of way... I think the owners feel their message isn't being relayed properly by Fehr and this is their chance to have it heard first hand.  Who knows if they are right or wrong in that. 

I think the meeting is a chance to mend some fences, and maybe after a lot of that warm and fuzzy stuff, drop a nice shiny counter proposal on the table near the closing, or a piece of one that speaks to a few specific points that the players are fighting for.  I doubt they expect to get actual negotiations going in the meeting itself but if they did say "please take this back to your membership.. we are willing to drop this point X if you guys are willing to drop point Y and Z, so let us know, ok dudes?"

Whatever the owners try, as you said the player reaction is key and of course what Uncle Don says about things when they relay back to him.  If he poo poos everything then we are back at square zero here, and I'm going to take my NHL hockey budget and spend it on a golf trip in Florida.

 

[Corn Flake]

This made me laugh:

@jtbourne 18 players are headed into the meeting w/ owners today. Can personally confirm that two of them are flat-out idiots. Fingers crossed on rest

oooh the guessing we shall do!

 

[Redleaf]

So I see what you're saying but from my perspective if the owners try to use this as an opportunity to try and split the ranks and go around Fehr, I think they'll widen that chasm of bad feelings.

I don't think they would attempt to do that.. at least not in any direct kind of way... I think the owners feel their message isn't being relayed properly by Fehr and this is their chance to have it heard first hand.  Who knows if they are right or wrong in that. 

I think the meeting is a chance to mend some fences, and maybe after a lot of that warm and fuzzy stuff, drop a nice shiny counter proposal on the table near the closing, or a piece of one that speaks to a few specific points that the players are fighting for.  I doubt they expect to get actual negotiations going in the meeting itself but if they did say "please take this back to your membership.. we are willing to drop this point X if you guys are willing to drop point Y and Z, so let us know, ok dudes?"

Whatever the owners try, as you said the player reaction is key and of course what Uncle Don says about things when they relay back to him.  If he poo poos everything then we are back at square zero here, and I'm going to take my NHL hockey budget and spend it on a golf trip in Florida.

I agree with you in that, if the owners do drop a new proposal on the table today, we should see some form of traction take place in negotiations.  If they do not, the extreme opposite may occur, and in quick order. I have to believe we are coming to a head with these negotiations either way.

I give it 2 more weeks (hopefully sooner)at the most before we start to see any light at the end of the tunnel. If there is no traction before than, I'm guessing we'll see a vote to move ahead with decertifation. That decision could very well take this whole thing into another longer, darker, and more uncertain tunnel. It should start to get very interesting starting today at 2pm.

 

[bustaheims]

If there is no traction before than, I'm guessing we'll see a vote to move ahead with decertifation.

I'm not so sure about that. I know the Fehr's have, in the past, said they're not fans of that step, and for good reasons - it's essentially a poison pill for the union. All their current contracts would be invalid without a CBA and they'd lose all the rights they've bargained as a union. That means guaranteed contracts go out the window for all but the elite players. Minimum salaries go out the window. Mandatory health insurance goes out the window. Pension contributions go out the window, and so on and so forth. All it opens up for the membership as a whole is potential for antitrust lawsuits, depending on how the league acts after the union decertifies/disclaims interest. Maybe that fear sparks something on the owner's side (it may have in the NBA and the NFL), but, if it doesn't, and the league decides to suspend operations, the players could really be left with nothing. And, even if it does spark something, until the union reforms, the league won't have anyone it can legally negotiate a CBA with.

 

[Redleaf]

If there is no traction before than, I'm guessing we'll see a vote to move ahead with decertifation.

I'm not so sure about that. I know the Fehr's have, in the past, said they're not fans of that step, and for good reasons - it's essentially a poison pill for the union. All their current contracts would be invalid without a CBA and they'd lose all the rights they've bargained as a union. That means guaranteed contracts go out the window for all but the elite players. Minimum salaries go out the window. Mandatory health insurance goes out the window. Pension contributions go out the window, and so on and so forth. All it opens up for the membership as a whole is potential for antitrust lawsuits, depending on how the league acts after the union decertifies/disclaims interest. Maybe that fear sparks something on the owner's side (it may have in the NBA and the NFL), but, if it doesn't, and the league decides to suspend operations, the players could really be left with nothing. And, even if it does spark something, until the union reforms, the league won't have anyone it can legally negotiate a CBA with.

I'm sure Fehr has made the players well aware of all the risks involved in decertifying, yet it remains an option he has put forth to the union. Whether its just a threat or something he is seriously preparing for is still unknown, but I have to believe that if this thing doesn't grow legs pretty soon, one side or the other may go nuclear, and if the league pulls the plug, then where does that leave the players next year when they gather at the bargaining table? Not too many options left if you're the players.

 

[caver]

This made me laugh:

@jtbourne 18 players are headed into the meeting w/ owners today. Can personally confirm that two of them are flat-out idiots. Fingers crossed on rest

oooh the guessing we shall do!

6 minutes into the meeting the players dropped the gloves, jerseyed the owners and connected with several rights to the head...   

 

[hockeyfan1]

I enjoyed this....

Check out the photo of Jacobs.

http://www.downgoesbrown.com/2012/12/nhl-lockout-players-owners-meeting.html

Laughter the best medicine right now!  Funny article by DGB and oh yeah, not to mention... the "emperor"!!