National Hockey League owners must come up with a plan that won’t humiliate the stars it needs to succeed and they better do it fast, says Sherry Ross.

NEW YORK — Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but the National Hockey League is poised on the brink of wiping out the 2004-05 season, or of making a last-ditch effort to salvage it.

Although no “talks” have been held since Thursday, when representatives from the league and the NHL Players Association met in New York, talking has been going on virtually non-stop before and since that sitdown.

Depending on the source, opinions range from the pessimism of losing not only this season but the next as well, to player/owner Mario Lemieux’s guess at a “50-50 chance” of a settlement, which ranks among the more hopeful voices of the past few days.

While the players appeared resigned to the idea of accepting some tiered salary cap proposal, the NHLPA has reportedly been irked by the NHL’s changing stance on other issues, such as the age for free agency and the conditions for salary arbitration.

The idea of a cap within in cap, a 24 percent cap on salary arbitration awards, seems to have aroused the most anger among the players. This 24 percent cap is not believed to have been offered as part of the NHL’s most recent proposal, but the fact that it was discussed at last week’s meeting has raised some hackles among the NHLPA members.

The amount of the team payroll cap — a minimum of $32 million per team — hasn’t budged all that much from September’s $31.5 million desired by the NHL. The fact that the payroll cap (which has a ceiling of $42 million) can be adjusted downward if the league doesn’t meet expected revenues has also been met with skepticism on the part of the players. Not only does the NHLPA remain wary of the league’s accounting practices, but given little hope for increased television revenues and the lack of further NHL expansion in the near future, the players also have to wonder about the owners’ ability to make the game more profitable. Or, for that matter, if they would have that much incentive with such a restrictive collective bargaining agreement in place.

Why fret when you can just reach into the players’ pockets to make up for any difference?

There are reasonable players and owners anxious to get whatever semblance of a season can be cobbled together underway. To not do so would see the NHL mired in numerous financial and contractual entanglements, not the least of which would be what to do with this year’s entry draft of junior players in June.

Right now, the puck is on the NHL’s stick. To put it in Seinfeldian terms, the owners have “hand.” They have the power to package a proposal that would strengthen the bottom line of the league’s 30 member clubs without humiliating the very star players needed to make the NHL an attractive entertainment option. Both sources and logic indicate that within the next three days, a final, formal proposal will be made, and that it then will be up to the union to accept or reject the offer.

Enough damage has been done. The time for tweaking is over. It’s time to get real.