NHL, players ready to drop the puck

NEW YORK – Open the arenas, break out the skates and fire up the Zamboni.

The National Hockey League is back.

After losing an entire season to a lockout, players and owners ended an all-night bargaining session Wednesday by reaching their goal: a tentative deal, expected to include a salary cap, that nearly ensures hockey will return this fall.

The six-year pact still needs to be ratified by both sides. The players’ association has scheduled a members’ meeting in Toronto next week, while the NHL board of governors plans to gather next Thursday in New York for a vote.

“It’s a new day,” Philadelphia Flyers coach Ken Hitchcock said. “It’s pretty exciting.”

And about time.

“At the end of the day, everybody lost,” said Wayne Gretzky, the NHL’s career scoring leader and the managing partner of the Phoenix Coyotes. “We almost crippled our industry. It was very disappointing what happened.”

The last round of negotiations began Tuesday at noon and culminated around noon Wednesday with a joint news release announcing the deal.

Though details won’t be released until both sides approve it, a salary cap would be something players’ union executive director Bob Goodenow never wanted.

Once everyone signs off on the deal, the league can begin the difficult task of gaining public support. No matter who won or lost, the fight cost the NHL a full season.

“To be totally honest, I really don’t care what the deal is anymore. All I care about is getting the game back on the ice,” Flyers star Jeremy Roenick said in a telephone interview during a celebrity golf event in Nevada.

“I think the deal is not great for the players. It is definitely an owner-friendly deal. For the last 10 years, the players have made a lot of money and now we are in a position where everybody is going to make money,” he said.

“Unfortunately, it had to take a whole year to get to a point where we could have been last year.”

This lockout was worse than any in sports, dwarfing the one that cut the 1994-95 hockey season nearly in half and resulted in the agreement that expired last September.

In February, commissioner Gary Bettman canceled the season, making the NHL the first North American sports league to lose a year because of a labor dispute.

While the NHL seems to have received what it wanted, there is no way to measure the damage done to a sport that already was the least popular of the four major leagues in the United States.

If all goes according to plan, a scaled-down draft is expected to be held later this month and training camps will open in September from Vancouver to Miami. NHL games will be back on the schedule in October.

It took all night and then some for the final round of negotiations to produce an agreement.

The sides met for 10 straight days in New York, and it became clear Wednesday morning – the 301st day of the lockout – that they weren’t going to leave the room without an agreement.

The expected salary cap likely will have a ceiling of $39 million and a minimum around $22 million.

Player salaries will not exceed 54 percent of league-wide revenues, expected to be around $1.8 billion. Players will also put money into escrow, and after each season that will be used to balance out the set percentage based on actual revenues.

Bettman warned in February that the union passed up offers that were better than any it would see once a year of hockey was lost.

Just days before the season was wiped out, the players’ association said for the first time it would accept a salary cap if the league dropped its desire to link player costs to revenues.

Negotiations resumed in mid-March.

Bettman promised “cost certainty” in the form of a hard salary cap to the owners and he got it.

The landscape of the NHL will be quite different than it was in June 2004 when the Tampa Bay Lightning skated off with the Stanley Cup in the league’s last game before the lockout. For the first time since a flu epidemic in 1919, there was no Stanley Cup champion in 2005.

When the league launches again, it will do so with a new salary structure that keeps high-spending teams such as Detroit, Toronto, Philadelphia and the New York Rangers in check.

The first order of business after ratification will be to get a majority of the players signed. The belief is that last season’s contracts will be wiped from the books, leaving many without deals.

Those who are still under contract will have their salaries reduced by 24 percent, a concept first proposed by the union last December. Some high-priced players will also be on the market as teams pare payrolls to get down to the cap.

Even with the salary rollback, nine teams would’ve been over the cap based on payrolls at the end of the 2003-04 season.

There will also be rules changes, some that could include the size of goaltender equipment to a shootout to eliminate tie games.