NHL and NHLPA to meet in Toronto Thursday
Canadian Press
1/19/2005
NHL talks lasted nearly five hours at Chicago's O'Hare Airport on Wednesday,
with the promise to meet again on Thursday in Toronto.
Neither side commented much on how the session went - or had much to say on anything else for that matter. But the fact there will be another meeting is a glimmer of hope.
"There was dialogue and communication, and that's what I set out to accomplish," NHL Players' Association president Trevor Linden after the meeting before leaving.
Wednesday's session started at 11:15 a.m. EST and ended at 4:10 p.m.
Linden, NHLPA senior director Ted Saskin and outside counsel John McCambridge met in an airport lounge with NHL board of governors chairman Harley Hotchkiss, NHL executive vice-president Bill Daly and league outside counsel Bob Batterman.
The group, which came together at Linden's request, is trying kick-start 11th-hour labour talks. It was only the third meeting between the two sides since Sept. 9.
"We credit Trevor Linden's initiative in requesting this session, which was informal, open and professional and which resulted in a constructive exchange of viewpoints," Hotchkiss said in a statement, his only remarks for the day.
Daly and Saskin said very little in a brief media scrum afterwards.
"I thought the atmosphere was good," Daly told reporters. "But I don't want to add any other than that. We want to continue the process."
Daly later added in a statement that the "parties had a good, candid dialogue, and we intend to talk again. Out of respect for the process, we have no further comment at this time."
Either way, the fact there is another meeting can't be bad news.
"That certainly is a positive thing," Devils CEO and GM Lou Lamoriello said from New Jersey.
Lamoriello, a member of the owners' negotiating committee, reiterated the critical time element as the season slips away.
"It doesn't take anybody who's around the game to know the number of games that need to be played, of what the urgency is right now if there's anything to come about from this," Lamoriello said.
NHL commissioner Gary Bettman, NHLPA executive director Bob Goodenow and the rest of the negotiating teams were not present for Wednesday's talks.
It's the first meeting between the two sides since Dec. 14 in Toronto, when the NHL rejected the union's Dec. 9 proposal and the NHLPA responded by rejecting the league's counter-offer.
"Harley Hotchkiss told Trevor Linden after it was over that he thought they made some progress on several grounds," Flyers player rep Robert Esche, who was briefed by Linden, told the Philadelphia Inquirer for Thursday's editions.
"No one is going away pessimistic or overly optimistic, but the good thing is, we're talking again."
More than half of the NHL season has already been scrapped by the lockout, which was announced Sept. 15 by Bettman. Through Wednesday, 662 of the season's 1,230 regular-season games had gone by the wayside.
The league has never announced a drop-dead date to save the season, but few believe there can be hockey this season if there's no agreement before the end of the month.
None of the four major professional sports in North America has ever gone beginning to end without a single game played. The Stanley Cup is in danger of not being awarded for the first time since the Spanish flu wiped out the 1919 final. Even the Second World War couldn't stop the Stanley Cup playoffs.
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