chiavsfan said:
The major thing to me has to be the media. I understand they have been doing this since day 1 of the lockout...but last night it was a get hopes up thing again. Then this morning, I heard all about the cap, but talks broke down again. The only thing I worry about here is if the media has EVERYTHING. I mean why would talks break down when this is something that could have easily been hammered out in a long overnight session. Something else had to happen, or the cap might not be the only sticking point right now.
P.S. - Sorry to start all these threads today, but this one didn't seem to fit the others
"Easily hammered out" is a stretch. There's still a lot of compromising to do and precious little time to do it, even in terms of the cap itself.
Each $1 M apart per team the two sides are apart is actually up to $30 M in salary spending league-wide. For instance, even if teams under the cap don't approach the ceiling, the market value of their own players goes up correspondingly with each $1 M of cap space, as does the cost of signing a comparable free agent from another team).
That's why NHL really had no choice but to reject the PA's offer from yesterday. A $52 M cap per team isn't a figure the league could negotiate against from its $40 M proposal.
That being said, with linkage off the table from the NHL and a cap on the table from the PA, both sides are finally speaking the same language and can actually negotiate now once one side makes the next step of significantly bumping its respective high-ball or low-ball cap proposal.