League waiting on Players' Association to make new proposal -NHL Update
The National Hockey League (NHL) made a surprising statement on why the a deadlock is prevailing once again between the two stakeholders as to the Players’ Association not having made a proposal as of yet.
At the same time, the league is also planning on cancelling the opening games of the upcoming 2012-2013 regular season in view of the lockout, which obviously has players panicking at the situation to see whether they will have somewhere to play or not next
year.
"Not prepared to speculate on next steps at this point," NHL deputy commissioner Bill Daly told The Associated Press in an email on Wednesday. "Obviously, we've been saying for over a month now that we would welcome a new proposal from the Players' Association.
That continues to be our position.”
In lieu to the league statement, the Players’ Association’s special counsel, Steve Fehr, also came out to say that the league had always wanted to lockout the players and that they had already made a number of “favourable” proposals to the league and franchise
owners.
"We are closer by definition (to cancelling regular-season games)," Daly added. "We are focused on minimizing the damage."
Fehr also went on to add that they are ready to make talks at any time and players are willing to compromise on those aspects which they deem fair enough. According to recent reports, the opening games of the regular season have already been cancelled, which
goes to show that the league is not messing around when it comes to the seriousness of the situation.
They have also proved up until this point that they are not all considering that the players are moving on to different leagues around Russia, Germany and Switzerland in order to protest the lockout, but according to some sources, the league is even considering
to replace players with backups to keep the game going.
It will be interesting to see how the situation develops and whether the NHL and labour union will be able to work a deal out in the upcoming days so that they may be able to save what remains of the NHL regular season.
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