NHL and Player’s Association Continue Talks

The Player’s Association has begun to look over the proposed expansion of revenue sharing by the NHL as talks resumed on Tuesday.  Don Fehr, NHLPA executive director, said that they will need to look through approximated 76,000 pages of financial reports just to begin with. 

It sounds like this is going to be a slow, tedious process and we shouldn’t expect to know anything soon in my opinion.  Fehr will be meeting with NHL players in Russia before scheduled talks next week, so he is going to be busy going through all this information and travelling halfway around the world. 

Everybody is keeping their fingers crossed that it will not come down to a lockout.  The NHL has barely recovered from the last one that left a lot of angry fans not very supportive once it was over.  Both sides are saying that the negotiations have been constructive and friendly, the players are surely not happy with restrictions on contracts and changing free agency.  In other words, the two sides are way apart no matter how nice of a face they put on it.  Fehr won’t know where the NHLPA stands until they can evaluate the documents and see how much the proposed change would really be.