You want to make a deal? You want to play hockey? You want to save a full season? This is what you don't do: If you're the NHL, you don't reject three proposals in minutes and go home in a huff. If you're the NHL Players' Association, you don't offer "three alternative ways to look at this," as executive director Don Fehr put it, and wonder why the other side says you aren't speaking the same language. You especially don't dangle your biggest carrot without thinking it all the way through.

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"I am, to say the least, thoroughly disappointed," NHL commissioner Gary Bettman told reporters Thursday in Toronto, after talks broke up and the league brass took off for New York.

"Today is not a good day," Fehr said. "It should have been, but it wasn't."

Finally, something we can all agree on.

By now, we should know spin and posturing and scare tactics when we see them, and we should know how quickly things can change. Bettman said he still hoped to play an 82-game season. His deadline remains Oct. 25 to reach a deal so a full season can start Nov. 2. Even if that deadline is not met, the odds remain that there will be some kind of abbreviated season. The sides are too close and have too much to lose. All is not lost. Yet.

Yet there is still too much BS – old grudges, negotiating tactics, PR moves – and not enough business, and until that changes, nothing else is going to change. Both sides have now made offers that at least look fair: The owners will split hockey-related revenue 50/50 with the players, while honoring existing contracts, in a way. The players will split HRR 50/50 with the owners, they say, after existing contracts are honored. But of course, neither proposal is as simple as it seems, and neither side will negotiate off the other's proposals, and fair is a subjective term. And so 'round and 'round we go.

[Related: Union boss Don Fehr slams league's negotiating tactics]

Again, to be clear, the bulk of the blame belongs to the owners. They locked out the players for an entire season in 2004-05, and they got a salary cap and a 24-percent salary rollback. Now, despite seven years of record revenues, they're locking them out again and asking for more, more, more. They want them to go from 57 percent of HRR to 50, right now, when that represents $231 million a year, if revenues are flat. They want to tighten contracting rules, when loosening them was their concession last time. Their opening offer was too harsh, and now they're being only less harsh, and they're still being stubborn.

Fehr helpfully reminds us of the 2004-05 background every time he holds a news conference. But again, the players are not blameless victims. They prospered under the last CBA and are better off than ever before. They did so well under the last CBA that they wanted to keep playing under the deal. How are they going to win here? What is their end game? They should not cave just because the owners want them to. They should not take a bad deal just because they are under pressure. But they have to acknowledge that the owners have the hammer – like it or not, as bitter as they are at Bettman, as much as they distrust the owners – and their goal must be to get the best deal they can. They are going to lose in the end; they have to mitigate their loss. Is this the best way to do that?

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