April 25, 2012; Boston, MA, USA; A general view of TD Garden before the start of game seven of the 2012 Eastern Conference quarterfinals between the Boston Bruins and the Washington Capitals. Mandatory Credit: Greg M. Cooper-USA TODAY Sports

Well, since we can’t talk about the pre-season, or make any solid predictions over what player will score the most, or even start our brackets for fantasy hockey… we might as well do something a little productive with our time here.  So, what’s a hockey fan and a history buff to do?  I’ve joked about the ghosts of lockouts past in previous blogs.  I guess we might as well take a look at those previous work stoppages and see what we can learn from them. Hopefully after this last soul-sucking, nerve grating, life sucking affair, both the NHL and the still active NHLPA can learn from them.

STOPPAGE # 1 (1992)  The players went on strike for ten days in the month of April. It was the first work stoppage in the history of the NHL. Both sides realized quickly that this could be fixed and reached an accommodation.  The games lost in that time period were re-schedueled.The settlement gave the players an increase in bonuses(for playoffs),and more control over the licensing of themselves. There were also corrections made for the free agency system. It was pretty clear the players won this one. (END OF FIRST PERIOD: NHLPA 1, NHL, 0)

STOPPAGE # 2 (1994)  Gary Bettman(at behest of the ownership) engaged in a three month lockout of the players. This lockout, which spanned from October 1st to January 11th pushed back the start of the NHL’s 1994-95 regular season. It also sliced the season nearly in half, reducing the number of games played from 84 to 48.  The salary cap was the hot button issue of this one, with the league in favor to capping player salaries and the union opposed. The NHL/NHLPA reached a compromise.  Entry-level player contracts would be two-way deals. (Contract pay determined on playing at the NHL/AHL level). There was also an agreement on rookie contract pay. (END OF SECOND PERIOD: NHLPA 1, NHL, 0)

STOPPAGE #3 (2004)  The salary cap once again made its way into a work stoppage. This time, Gary Bettman (the NHL’s new “trigger man”.) engaged in a lockout. This 310-day work stoppage cancelled the entire 2004-05 season.  It became the first time since 1919 (when the influenza epidemic killed 2% of the world’s population.)that the  Stanley Cup championship trophy was not awarded. It even says it on the cup. The 2004-2005 season is engraved with ‘Season Not Played’ . The owners wanted a structure linking salaries to league revenues. The ‘cost certainty’ principle which was brought about by the Levitt report, would in the owners eyes provide stability. The NHLPA just regarded this as a fancy way of saying ‘salary cap’.  The season was lost.  The salary cap was brought into being that year. This CBA also brought into being a salary floor. (Minimum allowed expense by a team.) (END OF REGULATION: NHLPA 1, NHL 1)

STOPPAGE # 4 (2012)  The league has recovered from the angry fans and has rebuilt itself. Like a phoenix of old, the league rises from the ashes of the previous lockouts. HRR(hockey related revenue) has increased from $2.1 billion to $3.3 billion in the last seven years. The owners want a rollback of another twenty percent of the top. They’d also like to end all salary arbitration, and cut contract lengths (all the while giving out ten year plus deals to players.) The players come up with a rather brilliant idea. Yes, we’ll give up the money they said. However, instead of lining your pockets lets give it to the league to make more teams financially stable. Let’s make the entire league a healthy league. Gary Bettman dismisses this idea out of hand, and after a second proposal which wasn’t any better decides to give an ultimatum(although he claims otherwise) to take the owner’s deal or face a lockout. The players’ refused and a four month lockout ensued.

The negotiations came down how the HRR would be split, and it ended up at 50/50. (First SOG by owners- score) The players did get $300 million for the “make whole” proposal though. (First SOG players-score). The contract length was reduced to seven years(or eight if they are re-signing) (Second SOG by owners- off the crossbar.) A pro-rated salary cap of $70.2-million for the shortened 2012-13 season followed by a salary cap of $64.3-million in 2013-14. (Second SOG by players – score!  Owners wanted $60M, players wanted $65M.)The salary floor will be set at $44 million for both years. Now teams will only be able to walk away from a player in salary arbitration who is awarded at least $3.5 million.(Third SOG by owners- wide of the net)

(END OF SHOOTOUT: NHLPA 2, NHL 1)

The players had to respond to the lockout by using a weapon that in normal circumstances would have been insane. The disclaimer of interest. That weapon of last resort was loaded into the silos twice. The first time, it actually brought the owners around to make an initial compromise that led to the final CBA. The second time, it finally made both sides see that enough was bloody enough. Had we had another ‘Season Not Played’ on Lord Stanley’s Cup, it would have left a permanent scar on the brand name. The NHL has lost an estimated one and a half billion dollars from this fiasco. With a ten year CBA now being ratified, it will extend the amount of healing before the next potential crisis (2021, or as early as 2019 if one side chooses to opt out.)

This will be a lesson for the Tyler Seguin and Ryan Nugent-Hopkins era players. As those young men evolve into the ‘elder statesmen’ of the league, they will have seen the disaster first hand and hopefully be able to guide the league and the players’ union into less destructive and more harmonious negotiations in the future.

Here are the major points that were gleaned from various sources:

— Players receive defined benefit pension plan.

— Owners and players split revenue 50-50 each season, with the players receiving $300 million in deferred “make-whole payments” to ease the transition from previous system.

— A pro-rated salary cap of $70.2-million for the shortened 2012-13 season followed by a salary cap of $64.3-million in 2013-14. The salary floor will be set at $44 million for both years.

— Seven-year limit on free-agent contracts (eight-year limit when a team signs its own player to an extension).

— A maximum salary variance of 35 per cent from year to year, with no more than a 50 per cent total difference between any two seasons in the contract.

— The minimum salary starts at $525,000 this season and reaches $750,000 for the 10th and final year of the agreement.

— Teams can only walk away from a player in salary arbitration who is awarded at least $3.5 million.

— Each team will be given the option of two “amnesty buyouts” that can be used to terminate contracts prior to the 2013-14 season or 2014-15 season. The buyouts will cost two-thirds of the remaining amount on a deal — paid evenly over twice its remaining length — and will count against the players’ overall share in revenues, but not the individual team’s salary cap.

— Revenue sharing between teams increased to $200 million annually

— Any player on a one-way contract who plays in the American Hockey League with a salary in excess of the NHL’s minimum salary plus $375,000 will have the excess amount charged against his team’s salary cap.

— Unrestricted free agency continues to open on July 1.

As anyone who reads my material, I sort of have my own Bruins ‘holy trinity’ for players. Marchand the snarky, Thornton the avenger, and Bergeron the saint. As of this morning, there is a fourth Bruin to add to the pantheon. Bruins defenseman Andrew Ference was in the CBA negotiations for the last few days. I posted how I believed his intelligence, and his willingness to factor in the fans would help push a deal forward and get the players back on the ice. Ference, the class act that he is sent out a punch of posts this morning to the faithful this morning.

“As players we can now do what we do best. Proudly pull on our jerseys and play with complete passion for our cities and fans. I hope that we can replace the intense negativity brought on our sport with a reminder of how great it can be when the action is on the ice.  From my grandparents to our B’s fans, I am deeply sorry that we had to miss so much hockey. All we can do now is play our hearts out for you.”

Forgive the personal liberty, but you have always played your heart out for us Andrew. The entire team has. The fact that I will get to grab my ‘Bruins brother’ and get one game on home ice makes a very tired soldier feel ten years younger. Thank you for considering the fans as well as yourselves in the negotiations. I know that if any man in the NHL has the intelligence and integrity to help restore a damaged brand, and make the NHL relevant in all things sport again, it is you. I am happy to have you as part of ‘my team’, and I’m thrilled to know that the Bruins will be skating again.

LET’S GO BRUINS!

September 13, 2012; New York, NY, USA; NHL commissioner Gary Bettman speaks during a press conference at the Crowne Plaza Times Square. Mandatory Credit: Brad Penner-USA TODAY Sports

In the last few months, I have been one of those few people out there trying to remind my fellow hockey fanatics that if they were trying to focus the blame on Gary Bettman, they were barking up the wrong tree. I made an attempt to show other members of the fan base that Bettman was just getting his marching orders from Jeremy Jacobs, and the rest of the governorship of the NHL owners. I wanted to take a little heat off the commissioner and tried to get the fans to realize that Bettman had stood up and made hockey the multi-billion dollar enterprise it is today.

Then the commissioner goes and pulls a stunt like this. Thanks Gary, I wasn’t one of your fans, but I thought I was not opposed to you. Until now.

The New York Post apparently got one of its people into the negotiations to hear part of the arguments between the NHL and the NHLPA.  Things seem to be edging towards a negotiated settlement when the commissioner decided to drop his own little bombshell. In the middle of the talks, the head of the NHL chose to announce that a number of general managers had told him they regret some of the contracts they handed out. (If you look at the spending bonanza that occured just before the lockout came into being its pretty easy to draw up a suspect list.) Bettman then told the NHLPA and the players that were there that the GMs would welcome the opportunity to “dismantle” their  teams.  This would be necessary for a few teams(Boston included) so the team’s spending limit could get beneath the league’s proposed sixty million cap for the proposed 2013-14 season.

So, how do you think the players took it? (Frankly, I’m a little amazed someone didn’t get a double major and an ejection for introducing Bettman to a puck.. at eighty plus miles per hour.) Naturally, the players responded with disbelief, anger, and posturing. (Hell of a way to derail the talks Gary!) Furthermore, the NHLPA  wanted to know which GMs had come forward to Bettman to express this sentiment. Bettman refused to name names. (So, this was a bluff that blew up in his face, or this was a smokescreen to cover the fact that certain owners know they’re in trouble and don’t have the votes to overrule a CBA vote.) The players maintained that such a cap( The NHLPA was aiming for sixty-five million), even with one or two of the ‘amnesty buyouts’ would harm some of the bigger market teams. (In actuality, it would only hurt teams that were profoundly irresponsible with their spending… oh wait, that’s about half of them.)

Seriously commissioner. The Devils just restructured their debt, the Coyotes are still a mess, and you’ve got another half a dozen teams in trouble. Half your clubs are in the red, and the men you represent seem to have no sense of control over their own checkbooks. You may have done a lot of good for the NHL in the past, but at the moment you are dancing on a fault line. You choose to interrupt a negotiation and tell the players and the union(which is about to re-arm the master reset switch with the ‘disclaimer of intrest.) that their bosses were idiots and they want to break up their teams. Could you have not anticipated any other response but hostility?