NEW YORK (CP) - Commissioner Gary Bettman cancelled the 2004-05 NHL season Wednesday, officially turning the lights out on the top flight of Canada's flagship sport. "If you want to know how I feel, I'll summarize it in one word - terrible," Bettman told a packed news conference at a New York hotel.
PIERRE LEBRUN
Bettman pauses at his news conference in new York on Wednesday. (CP/Paul Chiasson)
Still the commissioner was calm and collected in explaining why he pulled the plug, appearing like a professor as he outlined the differences between the two sides in the lockout.
The NHL becomes the first of the four major professional sports in North America to cancel an entire season from beginning to end. The Stanley Cup will not be awarded for the first time since the Spanish flu halted the 1919 final between Montreal and Seattle.
Even the Second World War couldn't stop the Stanley Cup playoffs.
Bob Goodenow, executive director of the NHL Players' Association, blamed the league, calling cancelling an entire season "unthinkable."
The union boss said the players had made all the moves and all the concessions. "Unfortunately we never had a real negotiating partner."
"Keep one thing perfectly clear," he added. "The players never asked for more money, they just asked for a marketplace to exist where they could negotiate with their clubs' owners for what their value was to their teams."
Bettman painted a picture of a league full of promise - but hamstrung by the last collective bargaining agreement.
There was no animosity, only regret.
In the absence of an agreement, the league simply ran out of time to play even a shortened schedule, he said.
"The shame of this is our fans deserve better, the people who earn their livelihoods from this game deserve better and there was a better way - a partnership with the players," said Bettman.
The NHL is planning for the 2005-06 season, and will pursue more labour talks but Bettman warned the league is going to have to look at a "completely different economic model and it is going to have to have linkage (between revenue and player costs)."
"The best deal that was on the table is now gone," he added.
Even that offer would have resulted in the clubs losing money the first two seasons, he said.
"I think it's a fresh start," said a calm Goodenow. "I think everything is off the table and we begin anew because we're under new circumstances.
"The process will commence again but under a totally different environment, that is absolutely for sure."
That includes taking off the table the players' offer to slash 24 per cent of existing contracts.
Whatever happens, hockey fans may have seen the last of such aging superstars as Mark Messier and Mario Lemieux. And they will have to wait to see the new breed of stars like Sidney Crosby, with the NHL draft on hold until the labour situation is sorted out.
"This is a sad, regrettable day that all of us wish could have been avoided," Bettman said.
The NHL's loss will be the IIHF world hockey championships' gain, with NHL stars expected to suit up all round at the April 30-May 10 tournament in Austria.
Bettman's news conference came after a flurry of last-minute offers and counter-offers failed to produce an end to the lockout.
There had been reports that players such as Chris Pronger, Jeremy Roenick and Jarome Iginla had contacted the league recently to kick-start talks. Bettman dodged the question whether any players had made a direct appeal to the league.
"We periodically heard from a variety of different sources in this process but I don't want to be any more specific than that," he said.
Goodenow said he was not aware of any such conversation. "I'm certain no player would do anything to jeopardize the process, however," he said.
The commissioner also took pains to say the differences between he and Goodenow were not personal.
"Please stop fabricating this personality issue between Bob and me," he said. "It doesn't exist. We don't agree on a lot of things professionally but this isn't about Bob and this isn't about me. This is about the health of this game."
All 30 clubs scheduled news conferences to follow Bettman's announcement.
The two sides appeared close after both came out of their philosophical trenches to agree to a salary cap (the union) and remove the linkage between player salaries and revenues (league).
Goodenow stressed the players only dropped their opposition to salary caps as a direct response to the owners removing linkage.
In the end, the league was offering a $42.5-million US salary cap, while the union offered $49 million. The difference was $6.5 million - that's what winger Owen Nolan made for the Maple Leafs last season.
"We weren't as close as people were speculating . . . We were still very far apart," Bettman stressed, noting that $6.5 million multiplied by 30 teams is close to $200 million.
And Bettman showed a hint of an edge when asked again why the league had not reached out to the union to broach the salary cap disparity.
"There's only so many times you can beat your head against the wall," he said with steel in his voice. "If they wanted $45 million, I'm not saying we would have gone there, but they sure should have told us."
Said Goodenow: "I don't think it serves any purpose to be speculating on what ifs, because the what ifs aren't for real."
The two sides stayed mum. There was no contact following the exchange of letters that ended around 12:30 a.m. EST.
For those keeping count, 834 of the NHL's 1,230 games this season had already been wiped out by Wednesday.
In the meantime, more than 375 NHL players have taken their act to Europe, although some have returned home after short stints. Still, the likes of Jaromir Jagr, Jose Theodore, Vincent Lecavalier, Alexei Kovalev, Joe Thornton, Rick Nash, Brendan Morrison and Saku Koivu are playing overseas.
"I'm not sure why the players want to play in smaller buildings for less money, but again that's their prerogative," Bettman said when asked about the players' options and the chance of a rival league being formed.
"(As to) the issue of a rival league, if anybody does it, I wish them good luck and I hope they have very deep pockets because we know the economics of this business."
The league says its teams lost $273 million in 2002-03 and $224 million last season, and an economic study commissioned by the NHL found that players get 75 per cent of league revenues. The union disputes those figures.
Bettman cited the union's distrust of those numbers as a major reason for why talks were so difficult.
"The union has constantly said they don't trust our numbers," he said. "We've asked them for five years to audit our books and they've refused."
Still Bettman said the NHL had grossed $2.1 billion over the 2003-2004 season and drawn 20 million fans four years in a row.
"That puts us pretty high on the pyramid of professional sports in North America," he said. "Our problem is we paid out 75 per cent of our revenues in player costs and there's no business that can operate paying out that large of an expense.
"We lived through a decade with a collective bargaining agreement that didn't work. It doesn't matter whose fault it was. It's nobody's fault. It didn't work. We honoured it. In the last two years, our owners, in actual cash infusions to the clubs, put in $500 million in cash and that's why we're having a problem.
"We had a lot of clubs that were struggling because teams could no longer afford to ice a competitive team."
The key stumbling block remained a salary cap - even when they both agreed to one. They just couldn't agree on which one - the league putting out its stall at $42.5 million with the union at $49 million.
The average team payroll last season, factoring in the 24 per cent player rollback on existing salaries both sides counted into their offers, would have been $33.95 million.
Including the rollback, four teams are currently over the $42.5-million figure and that's before signing any free agents. Detroit ($43.38 million), New Jersey ($46.32 million), Philadelphia ($50 million) and Toronto ($46.6 million) would be over. Dallas ($40.77 million) and Colorado ($40.27 million) would be on the bubble without signing anyone else.
Looking at the numbers without the proposed rollback, the Red Wings topped the list last season at $82.9 million, with Pittsburgh at the other end of the spectrum at $21.65 million.
Toronto led all Canadian franchises at $72.8 million, followed by Ottawa ($48.55 million), Montreal ($47 million), Vancouver ($46.8 million), Calgary ($40 million) and Edmonton ($35.7 million).
The league should have been basking in the glow of the all-star game scheduled for last Sunday in Atlanta. Instead it is officially sporting a black eye.
While Canada can boast triumphs at the world junior hockey championships and the World Cup of Hockey, the NHL has stumbled from one bad news story to another in recent months. Former NHLer Mike Danton languishes in prison for a botched hit-man plot, Atlanta Thrashers star Dany Heatley escaped jail time for a fatal car crash and Vancouver Canucks power forward Todd Bertuzzi agreed to a suspended sentence plea bargain after assaulting Colorado's Steve Moore.
Many hockey fans have already moved on, tired of the bickering between owners and players.
There has been little sympathy for hockey players whose average salary was $1.8 million US last season - the equivalent of lottery winnings for most Canadians - and owners who can't balance their own books in deciding how much to pay them.
Contrast that with the median Canadian income - half the country made more and half made less - of $24,300 in 2002. Using the last NHL offer, nearly 1,750 average Canadians would fit under the $42.5-million salary cap.
In reality, the high cost of NHL tickets and the watering down of the product had taken a toll long before this labour dispute.
And even though hockey is king in Canada, Canadians have found other forms of entertainment. And with most facing long work hours and no shortage of family responsibilities, there are plenty more pressing issues. Life goes on.
Still Canadians are expected to come back when the puck finally drops. That may not be the case in some of the league's 24 U.S. cities. Atlanta GM Don Waddell has already suggested his season ticket base of 8,000 has been halved.
The owners invested in a $300-million lockout fund that would ensure they could last an entire year without hockey.
The players, in turn, are receiving between $5,000 to $10,000 a month in lockout pay and there's enough from the initial rollout to last through November 2006. And there's more in the coffers if necessary.
Overall, the NHL and NHLPA held 38 CBA meetings together, 14 in 2003, 14 in 2004 and 10 in 2005. The first came when Goodenow and Bettman secretly met Jan. 6, 2003, in New York. That led to a series of meetings that were kept quiet until a much-publicized gathering in Toronto on Oct. 1, 2003, when the NHLPA made its first proposal, one highlighted by a five per cent salary rollback.
For the record, the last NHL game was played last June 7 in Tampa Bay, when the Lightning beat the Calgary Flames 2-1 in Game 7 to capture the Stanley Cup.
The NHL's last lockout ended Jan. 11, 1995, when an 11th-hour deal was reached and a 48-game regular season was salvaged. The New Jersey Devils capped a four-game sweep in the Stanley Cup final on June 24, 1995.
Asked what he would say to kids with dreams of playing in the NHL, Bettman said:
"My message to the kids and our fans is hockey's a great game. There's a lot of hockey being played at all levels. Get involved, do it. We will be back and we will be back better than ever and hopefully as soon as possible.
"Don't give up on the game. It's too good."
