With a players’ vote likely to dissolve their union, the NHL is changing some of its tune about NHLPA boss Don Fehr. (Mary Altaffer/AP)

By Stu Hackel

And now things have changed. The fate of the season and perhaps the entire NHL could be decided by lawyers filing into courtrooms, not by negotiators in conference rooms,. And, because the existing case law on what will be argued is so uncertain, the outcome is anyone’s guess.

Somewhere in the past few months, I wrote something like, “This is no way to run a league unless you want to run it into the ground.” That has never been more true.

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Deputy Commissioner Bill Daly and NHLPA special counsel Steve Fehr have spent quite a bit of time together, but neither side seems willing to budge again though the NHL is clearly in real jeopardy. (Bruce Bennett/Getty Images)

By Stu Hackel

Another page is ripped off the calendar and we find ourselves at Day 90 of the NHL lockout. Chances are very good that this foolish interlude will hit triple digits, further damaging a league that was — long, long ago it seems — finally starting to gain momentum in the crowded sports landscape, and a greater degree of acceptance and interest among casual fans.

The biggest shots fired yet in this civil war — the possibility of the NHLPA filing a disclaimer of interest to disband, a legal move that could permit a judge to rule on the legality of the lockout and subsequently expose the NHL to anti-trust litigation — is now on the agenda with news Friday afternoon from Pierre LeBrun of ESPN.com that the union’s executive board unanimously approved a measure to authorize a vote among the players on the maneuver.

In response, the NHL filed a class action complaint in Federal Court in New York seeking a Declaration confirming the ongoing legality of the lockout. The league also filed an unfair labor practice charge with the National Labor Relations Board alleging that by threatening to “disclaim interest,” the NHLPA has engaged in an unlawful subversion of the collective bargaining process and conduct that constitutes bad faith bargaining under the National Labor Relations Act.

Ladies and gentlemen, start your lawyers.

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Once again, CBA negotiators thought it best to try to shake the media hounds off their trail. (Mary Altaffer/AP)

By Stu Hackel

NHL and NHLPA negotiators went at it again as the lockout hit 88 fun-filled days. Federal mediators have returned to the process as well, and that can’t be a bad thing as long as both parties really want to reach a deal. If one does not, or insists there is no room for compromise, all the king’s men won’t be able to put a CBA together.

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Possible fallout from last week’s collapse in the CBA talks is that if they resume, Commissioner Gary Bettman and his deputy, Bill Daly, will go back to doing the bidding of the league’s most hardline team owners (Mary Altaffer/AP)

By Stu Hackel

In the early afternoon on Monday, Lockout Day 86, Gary Bettman opened his jar of vanishing cream, rubbed it on the schedule pages in The NHL Guide and Record Book and made another chunk of games disappear.

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Gary Bettman may be too focused for the NHL’s own good on ridding the league of players union boss Donald Fehr. (Bruce Bennett/Getty Images)

By Stu Hackel

They won’t be talking this weekend, but in the aftermath of the CBA train wreck this past week, the NHL and the NHLPA now have to go about the business of picking up debris and trying to reassemble it into, well, something.

Right now, this mess isn’t going anywhere and with all the ill will, it’s anybody’s guess at the moment what that something will be, what shape it might eventually take. Red Light habitually shies away from making predictions — a good practice, especially when it comes to these talks, as the most recent events remind us.

Taking into account the herky-jerky character the negotiations have assumed, it’s best to keep our expectations low.  That said, here are a few possible plot lines for what might lie ahead.

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Commissioner Gary Bettman was furious and on the attack after talks collapsed again. (Bruce Bennett/Getty Images)

By Stu Hackel

It was the most incredible day yet in the NHL lockout, filled with great theater and great passion. Not much else about it could be called great, however, and the bottom line is that the NHL’s collective bargaining negotiations, which only a day or two earlier looked as if they were on track have once again been thrown into disarray.

Talks are once again suspended. The schedule is once again about to be reduced. The possibility that the season will be lost is once again a growing concern and while it’s not yet on life-support — far from it — the only doctors in the house are spin doctors and they’re not curing anything.

What’s the result? More fan anger and alienation, more disillusioned licensees and sponsors, and another slash to the wrists by myopic, suicidal businessmen, not to mention a lot of heat from the media.

Here are some of Day 82′s absurd details: Negotiations minus Don Fehr and Gary Bettman and with a quartet of “moderate” owners joining the talks had been proceeding rather well and some good progress had been made, but the spirit of cooperation somehow evaporated (and Jesse Spector of The Sporting News traces that to the owners’ opposition to the players wanting Don Fehr back in the room, something the NHL apparently could not tolerate).

Each side blames the other  – which we’ve all come to expect by now — the players accusing the owners of refusing to budge on some aspects of the deal and the owners making a similar charge against the union. This round of denunciation began when the NHLPA presented a new proposal to a reduced NHL delegation of Deputy Commissioner Bill Daly and outside counsel Bob Batterman that asked for compromise on supposedly non-negotiable issues and it probably didn’t sit well with that duo, who left to bring the information back to league headquarters.

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It’s possible that Jeremy Jacobs (right), the Bruins’ hardline owner, saw the moderate’s revolt coming and gave ground. (Bruce Bennett/Getty Images)

By Stu Hackel

With owners and players holed up in a midtown New York hotel, it appears that real progress to end the 81 Day NHL lockout is being made for the first time. The elongated and excruciating process that brought us to this point, where there is finally movement off entrenched positions and toward agreement, has taken its toll on everyone — owners, players, fans, arena workers, bar and restaurant personnel, sponsors, licensees and even the media. “People are absolutely miserable,” Elliotte Friedman wrote in a CBC.ca column on Tuesday, sounding as if even he was ready to throw himself headlong into traffic on the 401.

Almost no one, it seemed, held out hope that the owners-players meetings without Gary Bettman and Don Fehr would yield any progress, and I was among the hopeless. Of course, there’s no deal yet and there won’t be until both parties find ways to agree on some pretty sticky matters. In fact, a number of observers continue to express extreme caution, as SI’s Sarah Kwak does here, and with good reason. Pierre LeBrun of TSN and ESPN tweeted prior to Wednesday evening’s talks, “Warm and fuzzy feelings from last night are gone. Things are tense heading into tonight’s meeting. Pivotal session that will tell the tale.”

Here are the updates from TSN  and USA Today heading into Thursday evening’s talks with Don Fehr and Gary Bettman returning and crunch time upon us. “I can tell you there’s been a hugely negative vibe emanating from both sides right now,” TSN’s Bob McKenzie tweeted. “Keeping this process on rails today will be challenging.”

But when Maple Leafs owner Larry Tannenbaum, one of the owners currently negotiating with the players says, as he did Wednesday afternoon, “We’re going to continue to talk up until we get a deal,” that is a vastly different sentiment from what we heard from both sides for the last five months, which was more along the lines of “We’re not hearing what we want, so we’re not talking.”

What has changed from earlier this week? On Monday, few, if any, gave credence to Steve Burton of WBZ-TV in Boston when he reported on Monday night that secret high-level meetings over the weekend led to progress and the lockout could be over as soon as Tuesday or Wednesday.

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Ryan Miller (center, rear) and Sidney Crosby were widely expected to be included in the players’ delegation Tuesday. (Bruce Bennett/Getty Images)

By Stu Hackel

With some second-guessing floating around and one strange report claiming the lockout was nearly over,  the NHL owners and players met Tuesday in New York City — minus their lead negotiators — for what some believed was a last ditch effort to revive the CBA talks and save the season. On Wednesday, the Board of Governors convened and it was expected that it would set a doomsday timetable, establishing a date after which even an abbreviated schedule would not be played.

But, for the first time in these negotiations, Tuesday’s session yielded some signs of cautious optimism.

Following marathon talks on Tuesday, NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman indicated on Wednesday after the BOG meeting that he and the NHL owners were  “pleased with the process” but declined to say anything further.

“We’re going to continue to talk up until we get a deal,” Maple Leafs governor Larry Tanenbaum, one of the six owners meeting with the group of players, told Nick Cotsonika of Yahoo Sports. “That’s all I’m going to say.”

In a very brief joint press conference following the seven-and-a-half hours of meetings on Tuesday (video), NHLPA general counsel Steve Fehr said, “I thought we had a constructive day. We had a good dialogue. In some ways I’d say it might be the best day we’ve had…There’s still a lot of work to do and a lot to be done, but we will be back at in tomorrow (Wednesday) morning.”

And NHL Deputy Commissioner Bill Daly added, “I think everybody is working hard. I think everybody wants to get a deal done, so I think that’s encouraging. We look forward to making more progress tomorrow.”

We haven’t heard anything remotely like that since talks began in July.

The same group of owners and players were to reconvene Wednesday prior to the 11 AM Board meeting but postponed and now expect to continue some time after that meeting. How the Board as a whole will react to these talks, that are being conducted without either Commissioner Gary Bettman and NHLPA Executive Director Don Fehr, is an open question. The Chairman of the Board, Boston’s Jeremy Jacobs, was in the talks, but reports say others were responsible for what progress was made.

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The gorilla in the room: Boston Bruins owner Jeremy Jacobs (right) is a lockout hardliner who some observers fear will make progress impossible at CBA talks even without Gary Bettman and Don Fehr present. (Elise Amendola/AP)

By Stu Hackel

In this corner, meet the six owners who will sit at the bargaining table on Tuesday: Ron Burkle (Penguins), Mark Chipman (Jets), Murray Edwards (Flames), Jeremy Jacobs (Bruins), Larry Tanenbaum (Maple Leafs) and Jeff Vinik (Lightning).

In that corner: Uhhhh….

Who will be in the players’ corner? That’s a tricky question. TSN says Sidney Crosby and Jonathan Toews will be in New York, but it’s not confirmed that they’ll be at the talks. Yahoo’s Nick Cotsonika tweeted, “A number of players will be in New York tomorrow. Before the meeting with the owners, they will decide who will attend.” So we wait to find out officially who the NHLPA will select to represent it in this unusual session of these CBA talks to end the 79-day lockout, this time without each side’s lead negotiators, Gary Bettman and Don Fehr.

Will the union want to mirror the composition of the owners team with some hardliners, some who are more moderate and some who are less interested in principle and want to play now? Will it want players who work for the owners on the other side, like Sidney Crosby sitting across the table from Burkle? Will Marty St. Louis go face-to-face with Vinik while Ron Hainsey pairs up with Chipman, and someone from the Bruins, Andrew Ference perhaps, chats with Jacobs?

Or maybe the PA would want six enforcers on its side of the table. Can you imagine George Parros, Kevin Westgarth and Paul Bissonette staring down Jacobs and Edwards? That might be fun.

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The Montreal Canadiens’ owner is said to be a moderate who may be better able to find common ground with players. (Richard Wolowicz/Getty Images)

By Stu Hackel

No one should be terribly surprised that mediation in the NHL’s CBA dispute has failed (and if you are legally minded, you might want to see why it didn’t work by reading Eric Macramalla’s CBS.com blog post here). Winnipeg Free Press writer Mike McIntyre tweeted earlier in the week, “If mediation doesn’t work, will the NHL and NHLPA try meditation? Or medication?”

Well, Gary Bettman had an idea: Why not have the players and owners meet face-to-face without the negotiators or staff around?

On the surface, it sure sounded like a good idea. Below the surface, maybe it wasn’t so good.

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