from Mike Harrington of the Buffalo News,

The current CBA is in place until 2022 but both sides have reopeners to terminate it this September. If either side does that and negotiations subsequently fail, we could be looking at a lockout in the fall of 2020.

The players want some relief from escrow payments they make on their salaries and want to keep generating new ways to grow hockey-related revenue. And there's no question they want a regular international calendar established that includes their participation in the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing. The owners undoubtedly would like to push contract limits down from their current seven years for free agents and eight years for current players. Good luck to them on that front.

Still, as Bettman says, there's no contentious tone being set here. With the money being brought in by Vegas and another $650 million entering the coffers from Seattle, the industry has never had more money flowing. The salary cap is likely going to be pushing $90 million per team in the next few years, making plenty of money available to players as well.

The message here is simple: Figure it out. The CBA. The World Cup. The Olympics. All of it. The early words are encouraging and that's something unusual for the NHL given its history of negotiation with Bettman in charge the last 25 years.

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from David Shoalts of the Globe and Mail,

This week’s failure by the NHL and the NHL Players’ Association to agree on keeping their collective agreement in place cast a big shadow on the prospects of avoiding another labour disruption by September, 2020.

This in turn threw a wrench into the major issue connected with this, the participation of NHL players in international events such as the 2022 Beijing Olympics. Unless you are a diehard fan of the World Cup of Hockey – and surely those are rare birds given how the event has only been held occasionally this century – this development was not a catastrophe, at least not yet.

But it does not bode well for labour peace in the NHL, even if both sides give the impression that they do not think there are any issues worth a strike or lockout.

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