I just went through it. Most of the proposal consists of team-by-team and player-by-player tables accounting for the savings promised by the proposal. There's the 24% rollback, lower entry-level contracts (that still leave the door open for unlimited bonuses for players who achieve top-15 stats league-wide), the light tax, revenue sharing, and changes to the arbitration and qualifying offer (QO) systems.
The best thing in the proposal was that owners can opt for arbitration in two cases:
1. When teams believe their QO would be overvaluing a player, they can take the player to arbitration BEFORE offering the QO.
2. Owners can, at the time of making their QO, elect to take a player to arbitration in the case that the player does not end up accepting the QO and does not himself want to go to arbitration. This ensures that there is no holdout.
But the PA avoided many other discussed changes to the arbitration/QO system:
1. QO's never get lower than 100% of previous salary (though the level at which players are only due 100% of their previous salary is cut from the average NHL salary to $1 million)
2. No "either or" arbitration (arbitrators can still pick a number in between)
3. Teams can only take 1 player a year and 2 players every 3 years to arbitration.
4. In both cases, teams must decide which player to take to arbitration BEFORE any offer is submitted, accepted, or declined.
But the most interesting part of the document, IMO, was pg. 15-17, a set of 3 examples of prior arbitration hearings (Martin Biron, Ruslan Salei, and Ruslan Fedotenko). The pages detail the comparables used by both the teams and the players in the hearing, and I could not believe the comparables used by the teams. NOT ONE of the team's comparables was at or below the salary award they requested from the arbitrator. In fact, of the 14 comparables listed by the teams, only 1 was not also used as a comparable by the player!
For example, Buffalo included Dunham (who was making $3.6 million) as a comparable for Biron in their case to get a $2.2 million award. What are they thinking? Are these representative of all arbitration cases? Is there any question why the league is bleeding money if this is how teams behave in arbitration cases?