The National Hockey League and its players union reached a tentative agreement on Sunday to end the lockout, after a marathon 16-hour negotiating session.
The end came at about 5 a.m. Sunday, the 113th day of the lockout, at a Midtown Manhattan hotel.
“Don Fehr and I are here to tell you that we have reached an agreement on a framework for a new collective bargaining agreement,” the N.H.L. commissioner Gary Bettman said, standing alongside Donald Fehr, the executive director of the N.H.L. Players’ Association. “We still have more work to do, but it’s good to be at this point.”
“Hopefully within a very few days,” Fehr said, “The fans can get back to watching people who are skating, not the two of us.”
The N.H.L board of governors was expected to meet in New York by Tuesday to vote on the deal ahead of a hoped-for start of training camps on Wednesday. Players are also expected to ratify the agreement. Under the quickest timetable, play could begin by Jan. 15. But ratifications, paperwork and the players’ desire to have one exhibition game could push that date back.
In interviews, union officials and players revealed some details of the tentative settlement.
The agreement will be for 10 years, and either side can opt out after 8 years. The salary cap for the 2013-14 season would drop to $64.3 million from $70.2 million in 2012-13. Each team will be allowed two contract buyouts to get under the lowered cap.
Individual player contracts will be limited to seven years, or eight years if a club is re-signing a player, the first time that N.H.L. contract lengths are limited.
To prevent contracts that try to circumvent the salary cap, no salary can change by more than 35 percent from one year to the next, and the highest-paid year of the contract must be within 50 percent of the lowest-paid year.
When the lockout began in September, Bettman said it was needed so that N.H.L. owners could get the same kind of deal the N.F.L. and N.B.A. owners were able to get after lockouts in 2011. Those leagues, and now the N.H.L., have reduced the players’ share of revenues to about 50 percent from about 57 percent.
Scot L. Beckenbaugh, deputy director of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, emerged as crucial player in ending an often bitter lockout.
Saturday’s negotiations went on as players voted to allow Fehr to dissolve the union if the talks stalled. Exercising that option would have probably ended the bargaining and push the proceedings into court.
But hopes rose that a settlement could be reached as the negotiations went into the early hours of Sunday morning. Beckenbaugh spent 12 hours Friday shuttling between the N.H.L. office in Midtown Manhattan and the union’s hotel two blocks away.
Finally he determined that it would be worthwhile to bring the sides together for a bargaining session, which began at 1:15 p.m. Saturday at the union’s hotel and turned out to be by far the longest since the stoppage began on Sept. 15.
Altogether, Beckenbaugh, 59, worked more than 30 hours on Friday, Saturday and into the wee hours Sunday to bring the two sides back together and keep them focused on the issues..
The lockout began Sept. 15, when the collective bargaining agreement that had been in place for seven years expired. The atmosphere was cordial at first, but became increasingly bitter as negotiations stalled.
On Oct. 18, the N.H.L. took less than 15 minutes to reject three union proposals, with Bettman saying he was thoroughly disappointed.
“When you make three proposals and get shut down in 10 minutes, it’s hard to think the other side really wants to negotiate,” the Penguins star Sidney Crosby said.
On Dec. 6, Bill Daly, the deputy commissioner, informed the union via a voicemail message that the league had rejected another proposal, less than an hour after the offer was made. The rejection came even as Fehr, surrounded by more than a dozen players, was announcing that a framework for a deal was in place.
Shortly afterward, an angry Bettman said he was bewildered by Fehr’s actions, and Daly told reporters that the issue of contract term limits was “the hill we will die on.”
N.H.L. and Players Union Reach Tentative Agreement to End Lockout
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N.H.L. and Players Union Reach Tentative Agreement to End Lockout
