Quotes from Gary Bettman, Bill Daly and Don Fehr

“Players have two interests here. Interest No. 1 is how big the share is and that’s not agreed upon yet either but the parties have at least moved on that. The 2nd one is how does an individual player negotiate his piece of the pie answer is players will have vastly fewer rights, vastly less leverage for vastly longer portion of their career under NHL proposal. Fehr on the issues: “We are talking about the entry-level system, the restrictions the owners want to place on restricted free agency the restrictions the owners want to place on salary arbitration, the extended period of time before you get to UFA maximum 5-year length of contracts, the provision that says there can’t be significant variability to what a player makes between 1 year + the next in a contract, which really cuts down the # of teams you can talk to + a # of other things. They’ve indicated to us from the beginning that the share was really important + the contracting issues were really important. We told them both are important, but as share is limited, contracting rights become not only more important but vastly more important.”

“We had substantially revised our player-contracting proposals over the course of the summer + in the offer we made to the players to save the 82-game season. We had limited them to what we consider very few tweaks to the system we think will make the system better, will help us grow revenues in our view + should heighten player salaries over time. I would’ve hoped during the course of past week they would have shown some movement on those issues toward us knowing what our fundamental concerns are and the message we basically got this week was ‘We know what your contracting proposals are and we’re not prepared to agree to them.'”

“We think the system will operate better. Obviously I think everyone knows that we’ve had concerns for a while about contracts that we feel are circumvention of the system + the cap + certainly that is definitely an issue we need to clean up. The other issue of allocating more $ to more established players has been an important issue for us from Day 1. Its something we hear from our GMs regularly. They believe they’re forced to make talent assessments 2 early in a player’s career, + it would be better for the game + their teams + the product + ultimately the revenues of the product if they could make those decisions a little later in a player’s career. We’re talking about one year — we’re not talking about moving heaven + earth. These issues are very, very important to the clubs. They’ve told us what they need as part of the CBA. If we were hearing from the clubs, ‘Geez, don’t let these player contracting issues get in the way of a deal. Let’s get a deal done + get the players back on the ice, then that’s what we would be saying at the bargaining table, but that’s not what we’re hearing from our clubs.”

“I like to be optimistic. I don’t know exactly where they are on economics. I hope we’re getting closer in that regard with respect to these issues, they are important issues + we heard from the players how important it is to them today. They heard from us how important they are to the clubs, but are not a lot. If we can find some way to address our concerns on these issues, we can move this process forward. I just don’t right now, given their opposition to addressing some of these issues, I don’t know where we go.”