Fehr questions NHL's latest offer to players

Privately, many NHL players think the league took a step toward ending the labor dispute when it made a new proposal for a six-year collective-bargaining agreement Tuesday.

But that's not the impression given by Donald Fehr in a letter he sent to players after he reviewed the proposal. The letter, which was released to TSN in Canada, shows a lot of negotiating still needs to be done if an 82-game season is going to be played.

Fehr, executive director of the NHL Players' Association, wrote that "the proposal does represent movement from their last negotiating position, but still represents very large, immediate and continuing concessions by players to owners, in salary and benefits . . . and in individual player contracting rules."

Representatives from the NHL and the players' union will meet Thursday in Toronto, where the NHLPA is expected to make a counteroffer.

The clock is ticking. The league says it needs a new agreement signed by Oct. 25 in order to have a one-week training camp and to start an 82-game season Nov. 2.

The owners offered a 50-50 split on hockey-related revenue and $200 million in revenue-sharing, among other changes, in a long, complex proposal.

Wrote Fehr to the players: "Simply put, the owners' new proposal, while not quite as Draconian as their previous proposals, still represents enormous reductions in player salaries and individual contracting rights. As you will see, at the 5 percent industry growth rate the owners predict, the salary reduction over six years exceeds $1.6 billion. What do the owners offer in return?"

NHL commissioner Gary Bettman said there would be no rollback in players' salaries, though some of the payments will be deferred. The NHL made all the details of its proposal public Wednesday.

In the new proposal, there will be a minimum of $43.9 million that teams must spend on salaries, and a maximum of $59.9 million. However, because of the transition to a new scale, teams can exceed the maximum in 2012-13 and spend as much as $70.2 million.

In the last CBA, the players received 57 percent of hockey-related revenues. Fehr said that based on last year's revenue numbers, it would mean that players' salaries would be cut by about $231 million this season.

Fehr told the union he did not know "whether this proposal is a serious attempt to negotiate an agreement, or just another step down the road." He added that the next several days will "answer that question."

Fehr, who wants the revenue-sharing figure to top the $200 million offered by the league, figures to fight a stipulation that AHL players receiving more than $105,000 would count against the big-league club's salary cap, along with a provision that contracts cannot exceed five years and cannot have their yearly salary variance exceed 5 percent.

The NHLPA is also expected to balk at a proposal involving players who signed for more than five years. (The owners made these deals, and are now saying, in essence, that they were dumb to make them.) The league wants to make the original team responsible for a salary-cap hit on such players if they are traded to another team and subsequently retire. In other words, if Mike Richards retired from the Kings before his 12-year, $69 million contract ended in 2020, the Flyers would assume his $5.75 million cap hit.

In the NHL's offer, it is not clear whether teams would still be able to receive salary-cap relief if they placed an injured player, such as Flyers defenseman Chris Pronger, on the long-term injured list.

The revenue-sharing pool of $200 million could affect the Flyers. Half of the money would come from the league's 10 richest teams.

Crosby vs. Giroux. During the summer, Flyers center Claude Giroux told an Ontario reporter that his surgically repaired wrists were injured in last year's playoffs by the Penguins' Sidney Crosby. Crosby laughed off the accusation in an interview with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

"No. I really like to win the faceoff. I don't try to go after his wrists, but if I caught it, I'm not sorry for it," Crosby said. "I think it's hilarious I hear that stuff from Philly. It's comedy to me. They're probably involved in that stuff more than any team in the league and they're the ones always talking about it."

Added Crosby: "He seemed to play OK, so I couldn't have hurt him that bad."