NHLPA talks about specifics of NHL’s offer in latest CBA meeting

The NHL and players’ union met again on Thursday and a big topic of discussion was the NHL’s initial proposal. On Wednesday, NHL commissioner Gary Bettman said that what the NHL put forwarded needs “serious consideration for us to move forward.”

It would be surprising if the NHLPA actually accepted the NHL’s initial offer, but, as Jesse Spector of the Sporting News reported, they want to at least find out more about it before taking the next step.

“We feel like we are making progress,” Canucks forward Manny Malhotra said. “If we want to know what to counter with, we have to know where they’re coming from, and why they’re coming up with these certain aspects of their proposal. It’s wanting to understand their proposal a lot more, and perhaps shape our counter.”

With that in mind, NHLPA executive director Donald Fehr probed the NHL for further details about specific scenarios that would be risen under the current proposal.

“If you have something that says we’re going to change the entry-level system, we’re going to change salary arbitration, we’re going to modify this, we’re going to change that, you can identify individual players and say,” Fehr said, “in the old system, this might have happened, in the system you’ve proposed, something else might have happened, and in a third system we might envision something else might have happened.

“What you’re engaged in, if you represent players, is sort of two things. You want to know what the aggregate produces, but you also want to know how it affects individual players.”

In case you’re wondering, yes, the Philadelphia Flyers massively frontloaded 14-year offer sheet with Shea Weber was brought up, but NHL deputy commissioner Bill Daly claims that it was mentioned in a “lighthearted way.”