Bettman: Deal Is “Off The Table”, Daly: Contract Term Limits “Hill We Will Die On”

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A less than enthused Gary Bettman just spoke. Mandatory Credit: Brad Penner-US PRESSWIRE

It’s absolutely not good.

We’ve gone from hopeful optimism, to confusion, back to square one.

Gary Bettman has just responded to Donald Fehr’s press conference, and it’s no good.

Here’s a few bullets from the Bettman / Bill Daly presser:

From Bill Daly:

term of CBA is a big demand
term limits of contracts, “hill we will die on”. In other words, the NHL is in no way prepared to concede anything longer than 5 years.
union is ‘cherry picking’ when they say both sides are close, it’s really not the case

And now, the reason you came here.

From Gary Bettman:

NHL is looking for long term agreement, that’s what fans, players deserve, business partners deserve
what owners did was virtually put a new 100M on the table on Wednesday night, in the hopes that it would help show that NHL wanted to get back and play very much as quickly as possible.
Union’s reponse was shockingly silent, so to speak in these actions, almost no reaction,
“The owners were besides themselves” said they don’t know what happened, but this process is over, “clearly the union doesn’t want to make a deal”
Owners wanted to leave negotiating session, players requested they not leave
Owners ready to make another concession, but needed some key elements met
appears that the union is suggesting that we are close to a deal, those moves were contingent on the union specificially agreeing on other things, that didn’t happen
“we have moved dramatically, we are proposing a long term system that will pay players billions and billions of dollars…but we have to have a system that works”
“disappointed beyond belief”
“take a deep breath and try to regroup”
“the things we added to the table this week are now off the table”