It was early January the first time I read a news article referring to the NHL season as "on the brink of cancellation". Any day now, the article intimated, the entire season will have to be cancelled.
Yesterday, over a month later, I read the same phrase. Despite universal agreement that something would happen in the last few weeks, nothing continues to happen, and at a breakneck pace. The unchanging status of the season - still "on the brink" of disappearing - reflects the unchanging progress in the negotiations. Despite a recent spate of meetings that raised hopes all over North America, there has been essentially no change in the stance of either team since before the lockout began.
Maybe you disagree. Maybe you're in the NHLPA's corner, and you'd like to point out their landmark 24% rollback proposal. You'd further point out the owners' immediate incorporation of that rollback into their own proposal, while making no concessions of their own. You'd be right, in a way; the player's association appears to be willing to make any number of concessions as long as a salary cap isn't involved.
Maybe you're in the NHL owners' corner. Maybe you would counter with the losses that the owners have put up with for years now - and forget the Levitt report; even using the NHLPA numbers, most owners are losing money. The only debate is how much they're losing. Maybe you'd point out that the NHL is the only professional hockey league in the world that doesn't already operate under a salary cap, and that it's the only of the four major team sports in North America that doesn't have some sort of player salary restrictions.
But really, arguing about which side is willing to compromise is a loser's position from the start. Because the truth is that neither side is going to compromise on the only issue that matters. The NHLPA can introduce all the proposals it wants; unless one of them includes a salary cap, it hasn't changed its position at all. The NHL can counter with its own proposals, and as long as all of them involve a salary cap, the union will continue to reject them without even bothering to poll its members. When the salary cap issue was the only real problem from before the lockout began, making concessions - even huge ones - on other points is a waste of time. It's nothing but PR from both sides, and listening to either side speak to the media about the other side being unwilling to really negotiate is laughable. It's like watching one professional wrestler call another a "showboater" - or listening to one politician claim another is catering to special interests.
The challenge to both sides should be to come up with a proposal on the other side of the fence that they could still live with. If the NHLPA wants public opinion dramatically on their side, they should propose a salary cap under conditions they can live with. Within weeks, there would either be training camp or a public lynching of Bettman and company. The same goes for the NHL owners; proposing a system without a salary cap that gives them a good shot at making money would end this tomorrow. So instead of using all the collective brainpower from both sides to bash each other in the media and figure out a way to curry public favor, why doesn't someone spend some time figuring out how to get past their own side's intransigence over the salary cap issue?
Until that happens, these negotiations are nothing more than a sideshow. And one that's getting less and less attention every day.