There was already common ground before negotiations on a new collective bargaining agreement began Tuesday and lasted deep into the night. The players’ union adhered to the league’s request to keep the meeting location in New York a secret, and with no outside distractions, the sides talked and talked from afternoon until night.
Once they broke for the day, neither side gave any hint of what was discussed or if progress was made, but both pointed to the next round of talks.
“With meetings scheduled to resume Wednesday, the league will not characterize the substance or detail of the discussions until their conclusion,” NHL deputy commissioner
Bill Daly said in a statement.
The marathon session highlighted Day 52 of the lockout and provided at least a glimmer of hope that maybe it will end soon.
Daly and union special counsel Steve Fehr, who conducted a long one-on-one session on Saturday, were joined on Tuesday by Commissioner Gary Bettman, NHLPA executive director Donald Fehr, a handful of team owners, and 13 players including Pittsburgh Penguins captain Sidney Crosby, who has been an active participant in the process.
The union did its talking Tuesday before negotiations began.
“We’re hopeful that we’ll start bargaining and we’ll continue bargaining until we find a way to make a deal,” Donald Fehr said early Tuesday afternoon. “Sometimes that goes in rather long sessions with short breaks and sometimes you take a few hours or half a day or a day to work on things before you come back together. I don’t know which it will be.
“We certainly hope we’ll be continuing to meet on a regular basis. I hope they do, too. I’m just not making any predictions.”
His hope was met — at least for one day.
Fehr’s brother, Steve, met with Daly on Saturday in a secret location, and neither provided many details of what was discussed, but both agreed that the meeting was productive. That was proven when the sides agreed to quickly meet again Tuesday. Until Saturday, there had been no negotiations since talks broke off Oct. 18.
“The players’ view has always been to keep negotiating until we find a way to get agreement and you sort of stay at it day by day, so it’s very good to be getting back to the table,” Donald Fehr said. “We hope that this time it produces more progress than we’ve seen in the past, and that we can find a way to make an agreement and to get the game back on the ice as soon as possible.”
Time is becoming a bigger factor every day a deal isn’t reached. The lockout, which went into effect Sept. 16 after the previous collective bargaining agreement expired, has already forced the cancellation of 327 regular-season games — including the New Year’s Day outdoor Winter Classic in Michigan.
Whether any of the games that have been called off through Nov. 30 can be rescheduled if an agreement is made soon hasn’t been determined. But the NHL has already said that a full 82- game season won’t be played.
Back in October, the players’ association responded to an NHL offer with three of its own, but all of those were quickly dismissed by the league — leading to nearly three weeks without face-toface discussions.
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