Just as American sports fans are diving into pro and college football and the final weeks of major league baseball's regular season, the NHL is shutting down again.
After weeks of fitful negotiations, rejected offers and prickly rhetoric, the deadline for the N.H.L. to avoid a lockout passed without a resolution, the New York Times reports.
In the N.B.A. and the N.F.L., “players have recognized that in these economic times, there is a need to retrench,” N.H.L. Commissioner Gary Bettman said.
Though the league did not make an announcement after the deadline, which was midnight Saturday, it was presumed that the league had shut down. It would be the N.H.L.’s second lockout of the players since 2004, and the third since Gary Bettman became commissioner in 1993.
Bettman had long promised a lockout if the players union did not agree to a new collective bargaining agreement.
No major North American sports league has lost as many games to work stoppages in the last two decades as the N.H.L., all through owners’ lockouts. Now the league is less than four weeks from losing more. With management and labor still far apart in talks for a new collective bargaining agreement, the start of the regular season on Oct. 11 is in jeopardy.
All that will probably be lost. Many see the lockout lasting into December and perhaps beyond.
