(The Player is an active member of a National Hockey League team. Anonymous by choice, he will provide insights about life in hockey on occasion throughout the season.)

There is one question I am asked quite frequently these days. It seems to be on the minds of hockey fans everywhere:

"Is there going to be a lockout?"

The answer I give, and it's an honest one, is that I don't know.

Even with the first bargaining sessions between the NHL Players' Association and the NHL in the books, there are still too many unknowns at this point to make any real predictions. I tell people that until both sides make their opening positions clear to one another, no one can really know how difficult it's going to be to find common ground.

Having said all that: If the rumors are true and the NHL proposes to bring the player's share of hockey related revenues (HRR) down to 50 percent, that could elicit a push-back from the players.

Cue the groans at this point; as in, "Here we go again."

Let's assume that the 50/50 split is indeed close to what the League has in mind. A lot of fans might think that sounds fair — after all, NFL players recently agreed to approximately 47 percent of revenues while their NBA counterparts bargained for a share closer to even.

On the flip side, MLB operates without a salary cap and has enjoyed a longer lasting labor peace than the rest of us.

The position of professional athletes within their organizations differs from that of most people because not only are they the employees, but they are also the product.

What, then, is "fair?"

I would caution anyone following this process to abandon any traditional ideas of what is "fair" or "unfair." In a negotiation of this magnitude, both sides will be looking for the best deal possible for their collective membership. Period. The owners will try to take whatever they think they can get, as is their right, and so should we.

The starting point in this negotiation rests on the history of what happened in the lockout of 2004. For those of you who have forgotten, we'll take a quick trip down memory lane.

The League argued that the economic system at the time was untenable, particularly for the small market (and some Canadian) teams. A salary cap was needed to give clubs "cost certainty" — to level the playing field for all teams — and help control ticket prices. How has that last one worked out for you, fans?

Bettman claimed League-wide losses of around $300 million. On the other side, the players wanted to work in a free market system, not artificially constrained by a salary cap. We contended that salaries had only risen to a level that owners and GMs had been willing to pay — a level they felt they could afford. We felt that it wasn't only competitive balance the League was seeking but, more importantly, to improve the bottom lines of the clubs and increase the value of the franchises.

Ultimately the owners won, and they won big. Or so it seemed at the time.

Players would receive 54 percent of HRR, and this number would be used to calculate the mid-point of the salary cap. The hard cap would be $8 million above that mid-point and the salary floor would be $8 million below it. To get to this artificially low number, the players took a 24-percent rollback on all existing contracts. In addition, the NHL and the NHLPA bargained for a revenue sharing system to help transfer money from the haves to the have-nots.

That agreement was ratified by the players in the summer of 2005; that season, the League played with a cap of $39 million and a floor of $23 million.

Fast forward to this past season, and the players' growing share (now 57 percent) of growing revenues (about $3.3 billion) meant that the cap had risen to approximately $64 million. Which means that the salary floor was $48 million, or $11 million (28 percent) more than the upper limit had been seven years earlier.

The good news is that the NHL had seven straight seasons of record revenues.

The bad news, for some teams, is that the increases in revenue haven't been evenly distributed, making it increasingly difficult for them to spend even to the floor.

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