NHL on hold, lockout expected

TORONTO — First, something that even NHL owners and players agree upon: Nothing will change between now and Wednesday.

Which is to say that following a Board of Governors meeting in New York called to coincide with Wednesday’s expiration of the Collective Bargaining Agreement, commissioner Gary Bettman will announce that the league’s owners have locked out the players. Training camps won’t open next week, in other words, and the season will not begin on time the second week of October.

Now for the far more significant question: What’s going to change between now and Christmas or New Year’s Day that will prompt the sides to make the concessions necessary to restart the National Hockey League?

Owners, after all, have little incentive to yield on their demand for cost certainty that includes a drastic reduction in the percentage of league revenues that go to player salaries. Each of the league’s 30 owners has contributed $10 million to a $300 million lockout fund, and more than half the owners claim they’ll be saving money by not playing, since they argue they can’t break even under the current system.

Players have little reason to believe owners will hold firm and are hard-wired to stay the course themselves. Reared in a sport that encourages them to donate teeth, endanger various body parts and sacrifice their personal creativity for team success, hockey players don’t know how to back down.

“At some point, the owners have to realize the players will never accept a salary cap or a system linking payroll to league revenues,” said Vancouver forward Trevor Linden, the highest ranking active player in the union.

Players also realize owners want no new agreement unless it includes a salary cap.

While owners dispute the terminology, it is clear they are determined to get a system in place that ties player salaries to a fixed and slashed percentage of league revenues.

There is one other thing both sides can agree on: Bettman’s assessment of the state of their negotiations, which broke up angrily Thursday following the owners’ rejection of the players’ latest proposal. Bettman said the sides aren’t even speaking the same language.