NHL Collective Bargaining Agreement - Definition and Overview

The NHL collective bargaining agreement is the basic contract between the NHL team owners and the NHL Players Association, designed to be arrived at through the typical labour-managment negotiations of collective bargaining. The recently-expired agreement was signed in 1995 following a lockout which shortened the 1994-95 NHL season by 36 games. (None of the games scheduled for the 1994 segment of the season were ever played, the lockout lasting until after the beginning of 1995.) The CBA was initially to last for six seasons and be open to re-negotiation in 1998, but was eventually extended to last until September 15, 2004 (one day after the World Cup of Hockey final in Toronto).

On September 15, 2004 the NHL Board of Governors, representing ownership, met and unanimously decided that the 2004-05 NHL Season will be delayed until a new collective bargaining agreement is signed into place. The ownerships' lockout of players began at 12:01 A.M. on September 16, 2004, the day most NHL training camps would have opened had the NHLPA and the NHL come to an agreement. By November 2004 it became apparent that the entire 2004-05 NHL season was in jeporady and supposedly "last-ditch" efforts were undertaken to avoid this, but thus far little, if any, progress is being seen. The general consensus of many sportswriters and other knowlegable observers seems to be that if the entire 2004-05 season is cancelled, which is likely if no opening date prior to the end of January 2005 can be arrived at, that the owners will attempt to open training camps in September 2005 for the 2005-06 NHL season using "replacement players" who are nonmembers of the NHLPA and those willing to resign from it ("scabs").

External links

• Everything about the NHL CBA, including latest on current status (http://www.nhlcbanews.com)
• NHLPA site - Several articles from the NHLPA's perspective (http://www.nhlpa.com)