“(NHL player and negotiating committee member) Ron Hainsey said to (league deputy commissioner) Bill Daly and (Calgary Flames owner) Murray Edwards, essentially, ‘We’re not deal-closers, we can’t finish this off. We’re very close, guys, let’s get in a room and work it out, but we’ve got to have Don and Steve and Mathieu and all of our staff in there, but we’re right here’,” Schneider said of Wednesday’s negotiating meetings, at which Fehr and league commissioner Gary Bettman were not present. “And (owners) essentially said, ‘If Don’s in the room, it’s a deal-breaker.’ And I don’t know what you do with that. I don’t know how you work with that. They cannot tell us who should represent us. It’s like you’re buying a house and the seller says, ‘I’m not going to sell you the house if you don’t hire this realtor’. That’s essentially what they’re saying.”

Schneider said the message from owners hadn’t changed at all.

“It was a new cast of characters, but it was the same old story,” Schneider said of the talks. “It was a take-it-or-leave it offer and they walked out of the room. We had a counter-proposal ready for them. The owners wouldn’t even come and listen to it. They sent (NHL lead counsel) Bob Batterman and (deputy commissioner) Bill Daly. We’ve heard back that they essentially said they were not going to accept our proposal in the morning before they even knew what we were going to say. It’s typical. It’s exactly what they’ve done throughout this negotiation, and I hate to say we expected it, but we expected it.”

Schneider believes it’s important to remember what has been done up to this point.

“The new owners wanted to come in and say, ‘You know, we are where we are, let’s get this done, let’s forget how we got here,’ ” Schneider said. “And I think it was one of the (PA) guys in the meeting actually said, “Well, let’s not forget how we got here, guys. We have over $1 billion of concessions already on the table.’ So if you want to bridge that gap, that’s one thing, but remember, we’ve already come an awful long way to get this deal done.”

Schneider continues, and talks about the "moving goalposts"...