Habs Fever: This gets done

People need to think like lawyers more to understand the behavior of Gary Bettman and Donald Fehr and the art of negotiation.

Fans and media alike are pessimistic but all that signifies to me is that the lawyers are doing their jobs well to discourage fans, trusting they are also discouraging the other side in the dispute.

In a negotiation, always discourage your opponent. This is brinkmanship. A good negotiator presents anger and frustration with his opponent until right before the moment that he is suddenly and unexpectedly shaking his hand.

So don’t be pessimistic they haven’t met for three days and they don’t on the surface seem close because they are very close.

One can see that the framework of the deal is clearly already in place. If this is a car deal, they were 5000 dollars apart on price, but now they are only 500 dollars apart and arguing over the floor mats.

It is easy to get lost in noise and not understand that any negotiation comes down to what gets termed as a deal breaker. To learn what is a deal breaker here, first let’s learn what is not.

The players will not break a deal over entry level moving to 5 years. 700 players that are already in the league are not going to worry about next year’s draft class over their own livelihood. It simply doesn’t matter to any player. It does matter tremendously to the league, so consider this done and in the bag already for the owners.

The next issue is the years of service before unlimited free agency. The NHL dropped their claim from 10 years to 8 years. Expect the PA to concede on this issue. Again, when only about 100 to 150 players out of the current 700 ever have to worry about the eighth year of their career, certainly they aren’t going to sacrifice a precious season over this issue.

It is the same mentality over the other supposed large sticking point and that is maximum length of contract capped at 5 years. How many players are currently on a contract that is 6 years or longer? Is it more than 350 players – more than half the league? Clearly not, in fact, not even close, so here again, we have an issue that to a majority of the players is simply not an issue.

Concede those three to Bettman because any issue affecting only 150 to 200 players out of 700 is not an issue the majority of players will worry about.

With those three victories the NHL gets to claim cost certainty.

What is left then?

The sharing of hockey related revenue right down the middle.

It was 57-43 percent, it will be 50-50. It’s a major concession by the players, but they have no choice. In the NFL, a much healthier league than the NHL, the players only get 48 percent. The NBA is ostensibly cut down the middle. One can really not assume for even a second that the NHL players should feel that they should get more than those leagues.

I see nothing special in an NHL player that puts him above the other leagues. In fact, one could easily argue that it is the NFL player who deserves a better split than 50-50. An NFL player suffers more injuries, more concussions though they are wildly under-reported, a shorter career, and very often his contract isn’t even guaranteed. Surely with all of that insecurity in front of an NFLer, he deserves more than 48 percent of the cut. An NHL player, of course, also accepts great risk of injury, a stick in the eye, concussion, a knee or hip replacement in his latter years, but that doesn’t put him ahead of an NFLer, but on par with him at best.

So we are at 50-50 in that big pie that everyone has been gorging on.

It’s done. Proposal Three from the players last week agreed to a 50-50 split of revenue. They have already conceded the biggest issue.

All that remains is how many years will it take to get to 50-50, because the only point the players must win is the contracts that have already signed must be honored.

Really is that too much to ask that a professional sports league honor the contracts they themselves just signed? In fact, if they weren’t all running around signing ridiculous 11 year contracts and spending like lotto winners this wouldn’t be so tricky to get to 50-50 in the first place. The owners complain about the players, but when the 30 are sitting around the mahogany table, they should be looking at themselves. They have seen the enemy and it is them.

So we are at the crux of the only real issue that remains.

The players need their contracts honored. The owners are prepared to do that but with a ‘make good’ scheme that would spin the head of Neil deGrasse Tyson.

As time passes and negotiators get more nervous and less glib, look for the owners to concede that all contracts will be honored and paid in full without a rollback. The 50-50 split will have to wait until some contracts fall off the books. This will be hard for the owners to swallow. They want 50-50 now, but maybe they should have thought of that in June of this year when they were spending like the Mayans were right.

If you are an owner, you can live with a 50-50 down the road when it is they who caused the immediate difficulty in the first place? If they can’t live with the mistakes they themselves created, well, man, they do have hubris, don’t they?

The final tally then looks like this: Owners get entry level at 5 years, UFA at 8 years, 5 years maximum contract, and 50-50 revenue split. They win. It’s a crushing victory really, but the players understand they have a limited amount of time to earn. After the 2004-2005 lock out, 240 former NHLers never played another full season in the NHL. It’s a short life and you can’t afford to lose a year of it.

The only victory for the players is the league honors the contracts already signed and I trust this is not a world where you look a man in the eye and say ‘it’s a deal’ and then look him in the eye six months later and say ‘I lied to you.” I hope the men who run the NHL don’t live in that classless world.

So there you have it broken down point by point – just like negotiators do, and you realize that it isn’t so difficult in the end and they are very close already.

I realize I stand practically alone in my optimism especially tonight when the league just announced they are at a stalemate, but I remain steadfast and confident that this gets done.

I will see you at puck drop. In the current schedule, the first game for the Montreal Canadiens is in Vancouver on November 3rd.