King Kaufman's Sports Daily

NHL owners and players started negotiating frantically just as the season was about to go down the drain. It was too late and they were too dumb, so down it went.

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Feb. 16, 2005 | I thought my opinion of everyone involved in the NHL mess couldn't get any lower. It has.

NHL commissioner Gary Bettman announced at a press conference Wednesday that the 2004-05 season has been called off.

Even as frantic last-minute negotiations threatened to save the season that Bettman insisted couldn't be saved beyond last Friday, then beyond Monday, and now for sure really absolutely this is it and I mean it Wednesday, the owners and the Players Association were exploring new ways to avoid compromise. In the end, they succeeded.

For more than a year now, the owners have insisted that they wouldn't budge from their demand for "cost certainty," which means a hard salary cap tied to league revenues. The union has insisted it wouldn't even negotiate on the issue.

A September deadline passed with no movement and the owners locked out the players. The start of the season passed and both sides clung fast to their positions. The midpoint of the season came and went, the All-Star Game vanished, more than 800 of the 1,230 regular-season games were canceled, and still nothing but hard stares. It was a classic standoff, neither side wanting to blink.

Then, on Monday night, after the weekend beyond which Bettman had said a deal had to be in place in order to salvage the season, the owners said, "Ah, well, how about a salary cap that isn't tied to revenues? Say $40 million?"

And the players union said, "Ah, well, if the salary cap isn't tied to revenues, we'll negotiate on it. How about $52 million?"

The player proposal also included an escalating luxury tax that kicked in at $40 million and an exception that let teams surpass the cap three times in six years, with steep taxes if they did so. Both proposals included a 24 percent salary rollback the players had proposed in December.

And just like that, the impasse was over. To understand why this couldn't have been accomplished in July you'd have to be as dumb as those involved in the negotiations.

But now instead of glaring at each other over an unbridgeable philosophical chasm, the owners and players were simply haggling over money, a situation in which compromise and agreement is always possible. By Tuesday night the difference between the proposals had shrunk from $12 million to $6.5 million.

And they still didn't save the season!

You have to get up pretty early in the morning to screw things up more than this bunch has done.

Next page: There's plenty of blame to go around. Unfortunately, there weren't enough brains