Peace is at hand in the NHL.
Capping off weeks of negotiations that followed the cancellation of the 2004-05 season, the league and the NHL Players’ Association announced Wednesday the long-expected tentative “agreement in principle” on a collective bargaining agreement that incorporates 24 percent rollbacks in existing contracts and is expected to set a tentative salary cap at about $39 million per team.
The cap also is expected to be linked to league revenues, with players receiving no more than 54 percent. Both the cap and “linkage” were concepts the NHLPA originally considered anathema, and the inclusion of both is considered a resounding victory for the league’s front office and commissioner Gary Bettman.
The six-year agreement is subject to approval by the union membership and the league’s board of governors, and ratification is expected next week. League and union officials said Wednesday they wouldn’t disclose or comment on terms of the deal until then.
The Avalanche front office issued a statement saying the team is “excited” by the news of the agreement, and said team officials – including general manager Pierre Lacroix – won’t comment until the deal is official.
The salary cap figure raises the question of whether the Avalanche, which was listed with a payroll of more than $61 million at the end of the 2003-04 season, will be able to retain all of its high-profile players, including prospective unrestricted free agents Peter Forsberg and Adam Foote. Forsberg and Foote, plus captain Joe Sakic, who is under contract for 2005-06, are the only players who have been with the Avs for all of the franchise’s 10-year stay in Denver.
It’s expected that teams won’t be able to make moves or sign players for 10 days after the CBA is ratified.
If the Avalanche, as expected, doesn’t pick up options on the contracts of veterans Vincent Damphousse and Chris Gratton, Colorado will have seven major veterans under contract for 2005-06. The seven and their rolled-back 2005-06 salaries: Sakic ($6.6 million), Rob Blake ($6.4 million), Ian Laperriere ($1.14 million), Ossi Vaananen ($950,000), Steve Konowalchuk ($1.9 million), Bob Boughner ($950,000) and Antti Laaksonen ($646,000).
Players with the Avs at the end of 2003-04 who will be free agents include Forsberg and Foote, plus Milan Hejduk, Alex Tanguay, David Aebischer, John-Michael Liles, Dan Hinote and Karlis Skrastins.
Forsberg’s agent, Don Baizley, said he had spoken with Forsberg, who is in Sweden, after word of the agreement broke. Baizley said Forsberg “is in the dark in the sense that everybody’s in the dark. I really don’t want to say anything until we know how this thing is going to flesh out.”
Although the Avalanche organization remained tight-lipped, that wasn’t the case elsewhere.
“We call it budgeting,” Calgary Flames coach and general manager Darryl Sutter told the Calgary Herald. “Now they’re going to call it a cap. All along, we’ve said that we need a system that brings everybody onto sort of a level playing field and hopefully this will do that.”
Dallas Stars general manager Doug Armstrong told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram that the announcement “closes one of the darkest chapters in our league’s history. As management, we have to make this deal work. We don’t have a choice. We have to make the non- traditional markets excited about hockey, and we have to appeal to television.”
Jay Feaster is general manager of the defending Stanley Cup champion, the Tampa Bay Lightning, and he views the upcoming challenge as keeping his team together.
“We became successful when we started to have stability,” he told the St. Petersburg Times. “We identified the core, stopped the revolving door. That’s when we started to win. I’m not looking to run a rotisserie team.”
In Vancouver, Canucks general manager David Nonis told the Vancouver Province that the rest of the summer will be a frantic period for team executives, with so many players unsigned and rosters to be filled under the new CBA terms.
“I think all 30 teams have some busy days ahead of them,” Nonis said. “You look at everything that needs to be done and it’s almost overwhelming. But the fact is pretty much every team is in the same boat.”
New York Islanders general manager Mike Milbury told Newsday that he is “looking forward to the insanity of it. That’s part of the fun of it. … It should create a lot of talking and interest in local markets. People talking hockey again is a good thing.”
In February, when the NHL announced the cancellation of the season, the league had an offer on the table of a $42.5 million salary cap, while the players had come off their insistence on no cap and were countering at $49 million. The fact that the cap will be lower than the February offer has caused considerable angst among players, but Atlanta Thrashers veteran Scott Mellanby told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Wednesday that the league’s “offer” at the time was in a very brief outline and predated the sort of prolonged negotiations that produced the entire CBA package.
He called some initial player reaction against NHLPA leadership “irresponsible. … Until we see the deal, you can get a better deal at $38 million than at $42 million. What’s arbitration? They wanted to abolish it. … Most important, I hope that this is the framework that will hopefully carry the league for decades to come and we won’t have labor mayhem every three or four years.”
Islanders player representative Adrian Aucoin told Newsday: “I hope all those players that were the kind of guys who just showed up to the rink to play now realize there’s a lot more to it. … You have to do your part to sell the league and make it grow.”
Philadelphia Flyers coach Ken Hitchcock also noted the league is considering as many as 13 major rules changes, including eliminating the red line for purposes of determining two-line passes, penalty shots to break ties after overtime and paring down the size of goaltender equipment.
“I think all of the coaches would like to get our hands on those rules (changes) as soon as possible, to know how we’re going to have to adjust,” Hitchcock said. “This (summer) is going to be very chaotic. When the game gets back on the ice, it’s going to be very chaotic as well. Going to have a lot of flow, a lot of chaos.
“I’m really excited about the potential of a real partnership (with the players). I’m real excited to see how it turns out. To see both sides pony up and become partners, it really has really unbelievable potential.”
Paul Swangard, the Canadian- born managing director of the University of Oregon’s pioneering Warsaw Sports Marketing Center, has done work with the NHL. He said he would “argue it’s win-win because now the players have to view themselves as partners with the sport. This takes a lot of practices in the other leagues and incorporates them, whereas under the old mode, it was a doomsday scenario.”
Staff writer Adrian Dater contributed to this report.
Staff writer Terry Frei can be reached at 303-820-1895 or tfrei@denverpost.com.
