TORONTO — The NHL and the players' union exchanged insults and accusations Tuesday and made no progress toward a new labor deal, chilling their relations as the league's lockout of players reached the three-month mark.
In their second meeting in six days, the NHL rejected a union proposal centered on a 24% salary rollback and a luxury tax triggered at $45 million. The union, in turn, rejected a counterproposal by the NHL to set salaries at 54% of revenue because it sees a salary cap as an unacceptable restriction of the marketplace.
No new talks are planned. Through Tuesday, 414 games and the All-Star game have been wiped out.
"If I've played my last game, it's something I can live with," veteran forward Trevor Linden, president of the NHL Players' Assn., said Tuesday.
"I love to play, I love the game, but I'm not going to sacrifice my beliefs."
King forward Trent Klatt, a member of the union negotiating committee, said he was pessimistic about saving the season.
"I would tell players to go to Europe. I would tell players to go back to school or take up entrepreneurial goals," he said. "If there's a compromise between a salary cap and a luxury tax, right now I don't know where it is."
Commissioner Gary Bettman praised the salary rollback as confirmation "of the magnitude or our losses and the accuracy of our financial reporting." His counterproposal included a graduated rollback that wouldn't have affected salaries of players earning $800,000 or less but would have cut salaries of those earning $4 million to $4.99 million by 30% and those earning $5 million or more by 35%.
Bettman said other provisions of the union's proposal, such as reducing entry-level salaries and restructuring arbitration rights, wouldn't curb the forces that lifted the average salary to $1.8 million last season and led to $1 billion in losses over 10 years under the previous collective bargaining agreement.
His counteroffer eliminated arbitration and reduced the age for unrestricted free agency from 31 to 30 but did not contain a luxury tax. He said the NHL would never agree to a luxury tax "at any level or any threshold," because it's "meaningless" and unpredictable.
"If you accept everything the union says will result from this proposal, the players will receive 56.6% of our revenues on Day 1 of the new agreement," Bettman said at a news conference at the Air Canada Centre. "We countered with 54%. We should be able to reach an agreement because, after all, this should be about money.
