Now that it’s got two wheels hanging over the side of the cliff, it’s clear the NHLPA’s approach to the lockout was doomed from the outset.

Outmanoeuvred at every point, the players miscalculated on several crucial points.

First and foremost, they have approached this as a generic labour fight. It isn’t. It isn’t even a sports labour fight. It’s a hockey labour fight, a completely unique beast.

Instead, they’ve been flipping through the Workplace Negotiations 101 playbook, where labour has the advantage over management. Take an auto shutdown.

As soon as it kicks off, GM or Ford or whomever is losing big money. Their supply channel runs dry. Their competitors pick up the slack. They need to get to back to work to satisfy shareholders and analysts, who only think as far as quarterly returns.

Labour, on the other hand, can afford to suffer in the short term. Their earning window is open for decades. Small concessions mean long-term dollars. Each passing day increases the pressure on management to resolve the problem.

RELATED

Putting on a show rather than doing a deal: Cox

Talks break down after league rejects players’ latest offer

In the NHL, this power balance is flipped on its head.

Ownership has a monopoly on hockey. Previous lockouts have taught them that fans will return, no matter how long they’re gone. In this instance, management knows that incremental gains will spin out into tens of millions of dollars saved over the coming decade.

Players are the ones who must think short term. If an average NHL career is six or seven years long, a lost season represents as much 15 per cent of their total earnings from hockey. In many cases, it accounts for far more.

It may be antithetical to the athletic mindset (‘Never stop’), but no amount of variation from the 50/50 split can uniformly benefit the union membership enough to make up for that loss. That’s the whole point of unions — to spread the joy and pain around equally. At this point, the NHLPA is fighting for its 1 per centers.

Nevertheless, the union has followed the auto-fight route — dig in, and then take it to the customer. They held off real bargaining until the last minute. They continue to move forward like time is their ally, though the noose has grown so tight we can see the blue in their faces from the back of the room.

The split of the money, the ‘make whole’ pact, the length of contracts — these are parentheticals.

There are only two issues here, the same ones that govern all negotiations: Who wants it more? Who has the leverage?

Jay Krupin is a vastly experienced labour negotiator with the Washington, D.C.-based firm of BakerHostetler. Add this to his bona fides — he’s also a hockey fan. Unlike everyone involved on the players’ side just now, he’s also a pragmatist.

“The owners want to change the economics of hockey. They want that more than the players want to make more money. Then it becomes an issue of leverage. And the owners have the leverage.”

This is what Fehr, an American with a background in that country’s national pastime, cannot see. There is no pressure from below, not in the States. ESPN doesn’t give a damn about this story, as they did in similar instances with the NFL, NBA and MLB. The PA’s PR machine is pumping out memos no one reads. The owners know that, and the owners are all Americans.

Far more importantly, while stoppages have badly wounded baseball and, to a lesser extent, basketball, they’ve been an odd spur to the NHL’s business. There’s a pecuniary case to be made that lockouts are good for hockey. Since the league’s revenue has grown to record highs in each of the years since the lost season of 2004-05, why wouldn’t owners want to access that cheap stimulus package again?

This fact seems to escape Fehr. In one of his New York news conferences on Thursday, he flippantly admitted he wasn’t conversant in the particulars of the previous lockout. Fehr is a man for a fight, but given how this thing has shaken out so far, he isn’t well suited to this fight.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

Even the weeks spent arguing over 50/50 seem pointless in retrospect. The NBA took three months to come to roughly the same revenue split. Many of those franchises share owners and/or buildings.

Knowing that recent deals are always the benchmark for new deals, why didn’t the PA retrench around that number from the outset? Duking it out on 50/50 smacks of theatre. But of course, Fehr gets paid either way.

Krupin believes there was one point on which the PA might have bent ownership to its will. That advantage passed untaken five weeks ago.

“I didn’t believe they’d lose the Winter Classic,” Krupin says. “When they let that go, I knew they were ready to lose the season. Now that it’s gone, there’s really no reason to have a season.”

What would you do now?

“If I was an owner, I’d hold pat.”

And if you were working for the PA?

“Try to negotiate on some small issues, to save face. Take what you can and live to fight another day.”

So — give in.

What we have now is the ragged end of a chess match between a master and a novice. Ownership is chasing the NHLPA’s king across the board toward an inevitable end, but the union does not have the sense to retire.

Surrender isn’t their best option. It’s the only one they have left.

They must now be coming to a realization that should have dawned on them from the outset, that management is not only willing to lose another season, but that it’s been hoping to all along.

MORE

Toronto Star NHL lockout coverage