NHL Crawling Towards Inevitable Labour Deal

They've agreed on the basic system. Now they need to sort out the numbers and the endless details.

If widespread media reports are to be trusted, that's the current state of affairs between the NHL and NHL Players' Association. The situation is nicely summarized by David Shoalts of the Toronto Globe and Mail:

"The union has agreed to upper and lower salary limits based on club-by-club revenues, but the sides are not close on numbers," writes Shoalts. "An even bigger stumbling block is an agreement on what constitutes hockey-related revenue, which is why both sides are going over the finances of individual clubs."

Stumbling blocks aside, there is a growing sense that a new collective agreement is inevitable, that it would take a very special kind of incompetence to derail the momentum at this stage.

Of course, the two sides have scaled great, unprecedented heights of incompetence in the past year or so. Which is why many of this week's news reports caution against too much optimism. But even Gary Bettman's number-one henchman has been making happy sounds lately.

Negotiations resume today in Chicago.