It's finally official. The NHL has become the first professional sports league in history to lose an entire season because of a labor dispute. The Stanley Cup will not be awarded for the first time since the flu epidemic of 1919.
After months of a staring contest, followed by a brief spate of actual negotiations, Bettman finally announced a deadline for the season. This galvanized a quick exchange of last-minute offers, all of which were fruitless. The exchange ended on a note very much symptomatic of the "negotiations" as a whole; the final letter delivered from Bob Goodenow to the league office concluded with the words, "You will get nothing more from us."
How typical. How predictable. Even with the league coming off its stance linking a cap to revenue, and even with the union accepting some form of a cap, both sides are still convinced they can posture their way into a beneficial agreement, all while killing the sport they're fighting over.
And that's the optimistic way of viewing these latest developments. Because either the union's offers were motivated by a sincere desire to make a deal, or they came from a darker motivation - posturing for the upcoming legal battle over declaring a legal impasse.
Viewed as a legitimate effort, these offers can only make outsiders wonder what kept these sides so far apart for so long. Nothing has changed since September, except both sides have lost a predictable amount of money to date. Bettman's statement that he didn't realize the league might accept a cap if the removed the linkage from league revenue, and Goodenow's statement that he wishes such an offer had been made sooner, has to have hockey fans tearing their hair out in frustration. Frustration that has been growing for months as both sides simply sat around waiting for the other side to make a move.
If Goodenow wanted such an offer, why didn't he ask for one? It's called negotiating for a reason, folks. And Bettman's statement regarding the likelihood of the NHLPA accepting a cap without linkage is similarly disingenuous - surely he didn't think the offers he made had any prayer of acceptance themselves? These statements, these positions, make so little sense in the context of five months of talks that it's baffling.
Or they would be, if there weren't a more sinister explanation for them.
Heading into this impending cancellation, there had been virtually no progress made toward a compromise. What started as a fight over a salary cap had remained a fight over a salary cap, with neither side moving on the only issue that mattered. While most spectators may see that as a stalemate, it's not. Should the season have been cancelled on that note, the league would have had very little trouble declaring that there was an impasse - and could then have started a season on their own terms, unilaterally dictating how the new agreement would function. The players would have to either strike or agree to those terms, and the league would be free to employ both union members crossing the picket line and replacement players. Advantage, league.
But that impasse doesn't look so certain now. Now that the league and the union have both made major concessions, it seems to most onlookers that a compromise deal should be attainable. With such progress having been made, a legal impasse would be difficult to prove. Without a legal impasse, the league cannot start a season until a deal is reached with the existing union. Advantage, union.
So it's certainly not outside the realm of possibility that the union only brought forth this deal at this point in the negotiations for that very reason. Too late to save the season - by design. Just in time to prevent a legal impasse from being declared. Just in time to put the union in control of the negotiations. They've made an offer that gave them public opinion and negotiating firepower, all without having to actually grant anything. It's a fairly adept maneuver, actually.
Not brilliant, though. A brilliant one would have saved the season.