THE CANADIAN PRESS
There is no chance the cancelled National Lacrosse League season can be revived, says commissioner Jim Jennings.
"There’s no hope," says Jennings.
Teams have been advised to cancel arena bookings, Jennings said during a conference call with the media Tuesday afternoon.
"We’ve released our dates," Jennings said. "To try to start this thing up again on a moment’s notice is an impossibility."
The cancellation of the season went into effect shortly after midnight Monday night with the passing of a deadline imposed by owners for reaching a new collective bargaining agreement with the Professional Lacrosse Players’ Association.
"This is a very dark day for the NLL," said Jennings. "It’s a sad day for me personally, for our owners, for the players and mostly for our fans."
But Jennings rejected the notion the league, which ranks far below the major team sports in North American-wide fan appeal, might now fold.
"We will be back in 2009," he said.
The NLL comprises 14 teams — Toronto, Calgary and Edmonton have Canada’s franchises — that each play a 16-game regular season. Most of the players are from Ontario and British Columbia. The opener was scheduled for Dec. 27 and single-elimination playoffs kept the league operating into early May in past seasons.
Maximum pay for a veteran player in the contract that expired July 31 was US$21,294. Franchise players — up to two men on each team — got $25,552. The fixed rookie salary was $6,880, the second-year minimum $9,282 and the veteran minimum $10,221. The average worked out to about $14,500.
The majority of the players have full-time jobs outside lacrosse and most games are on weekends so players can commute to games if they don’t live in their team’s market.
The NLL and the PLPA held meetings Saturday and Sunday in New York but didn’t come close to an agreement.
Team player reps to the PLPA had a conference call with the executive and advisers Monday night and unanimously rejected the NLL’s last offer.
To accept it "would just be selling the players down the river," association executive Dave Succamore said in an interview.
"It’s strictly a bad, bad deal, and we’re not going to recommend a bad deal to our players," he said.
Jennings suggested Tuesday that the PLPA should have allowed all players to vote on the league’s last offer, which the NLL had previously stated would be found agreeable by most players.
Succamore says he called Jennings on Monday afternoon "with an olive branch saying we had lines of communication open, `Let’s see what we can do."’
The owners had already offered every penny they could, said deputy commissioner George Daniel, but that the PLPA wanted to remove caps on individual player salaries and the owners couldn’t afford to do it.
"We cannot do business without the stability of a long-term CBA," Daniel said during the conference call.
Succamore suggested in an interview with The Canadian Press that the league’s stance was "a shot by the owners to try and break the union."
"They’re testing the mettle of the players," he said.
He then reasserted his hopes talks could continue by saying, "Our lines of communication are open."
"We’ve never had an agenda to break a union," Jennings replied when asked to comment on Succamore’s charge. "It never entered into our discussions with our owners.
"That was never our intention.".
Jennings said the NLL would not use replacement players.
"That’s never been an option for us," he said. "We want to play with the players we have."
The markets where teams are located can blossom if the NLL restarts after a year’s shutdown, he predicted.
"Without a doubt, we can come back," said Jennings, adding, "We never thought in our wildest dreams we’d be sitting here in this situation."
Daniel said the NLL had tried to negotiate with the PLPA since last December.
"Unfortunately, the union refused to sit down with us," he said. "That’s the main reason we put the deadline in place.
"The deadline was put in place in order to get the union to the bargaining table. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to reach and agreement (just days before the deadline)."
The union "wanted to change the entire economic system" by lifting limits on salaries, he said.
"That was really the centre of the differences," said Daniel. "That was the most important issue."
Daniel said owners couldn’t agree to play in an uncapped system and that a luxury tax system proposed by the players was also unworkable.
Payrolls would have gone up significantly had the NLL agreed with the PLPA’s proposals, and competitive balance would have been eroded, said Daniel. Given that prospect, "We’d rather not be in business at all," he said.
"We couldn’t negotiate in two days such a radical departure that they proposed," he added. "We’d rather be playing but we couldn’t continue under their demands."
In the previous two rounds of negotiations, there was a 12-day player strike in 2003 and a last-minute settlement on a 2004 renewal.
In Toronto, Rock president Brad Watters expressed his disappointment. His team, which averaged more than 15,000 fans a game in Air Canada Centre last winter, was to have opened play Jan. 11.
"However, you cannot come to an agreement with a group that doesn’t want to negotiate," he said in a news release. "The players’ union was given enough time to accept the proposal and meet the deadline.
"As an ownership group, we didn’t want this. It is unfortunate for everyone involved, but hopefully we can use this as an opportunity to restructure and rebuild for a 2009 season."
Colorado Mammoth general manager Steve Govett agreed.
"We’re going to fix what is broken and come back stronger than ever," he said in a release.
The Mammoth led league attendance last winter by averaging more than 16,000 for each of their eight home games in the Pepsi Center.
"Colorado’s fans have been the best in the league since the day we got here and we are incredibly disappointed to let them down," Govett added.
Earlier in the day, Rock forward Josh Sanderson expressed the hope a settlement could yet be reached.
"I’m still hoping something gets worked out," said Sanderson. "Losing the season, that’s no good for anybody — fans, ownership or players.
"I’m still hopeful a deal gets done."