I awoke on Thursday morning to breaking news that Sabres goalie
Ryan Miller had vented his spleen in a negotiating meeting with the owners in the wee hours of the morning.
The Toronto Sun had reported that Miller aired his grievances and voiced his displeasure fo rthe way that teh negotaitions were heading. The story went that Boston Bruins owner and chief player antagonist, Jeremy Jacobs, turned to Bill Daly was ready to leave the meeting.
Today, John Vogl of the Buffalo News caught up with Miller via text.
Like Paul Harvey said, "...and now, the rest of the story....."
"The owners wanted to leave the room and pull everything we spent a full day on. I asked them to stay and continue pushing through. I may have been passionate but there was no disrespect or calling out one owner by name. I have a lot of respect for any owner because they are a big part of hockey.
"I wanted more than anything to make a deal but we are not professional negotiators. We as players didn't have the experience or authority to make a final deal. We were trying to responsibly move this process forward as best we could. If anyone thinks that we did wrong by the game or by the fans then they are misinformed. We have a responsibility to about 750 players and we made moves approved by them and thinking about them."
I respect Miller's passion and his desire to keep the train on the tracks. At that point in the negotiations, both sides have created tangible traction and were achieving traction on some of the issues that had forced talks to break down from in the past.
Miller and the players wanted to keep the dialogue flowing.
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In the game of pro hockey, emotion is a part of a player’s equipment. It’s what separates the good players from the great players.
In pro hockey negotiations, emotions have to be managed.
Sabres D man,
Robyn Regehr, knows a thing or two about playing with emotion. He’s a battler. He’s doesn’t let opponents take advantage of him or his teammates. I caught up with the NHL veteran bar bouncer at the Northtowns Center following Friday’s lightly attended Sabres skate in which he skated with, Drew Stafford, Tim Connolly Jochen Hecht, one of Connolly’s boyhood friends who played pro in Sweden, and a couple of college goalies.
He gave me his takes on what’s happening in the NHL labor negotiations, from September to present. Like a hockey player who runs around chasing the puck on the ice is a liability to his team, so too are those people who get emotional under while duress. Regehr feels like the NHL owners and Gary Bettman have been doing their best to rattle the players and to get them to act irrationally and emotionally. Its easy to make poor decisions while you are emotional. There are guys at Best Buy right now buying 90" plasma TVs that they cannot afford, however, their impulse drives them to buy it now even though they cannot fit it in their car to drive it home.
This isn't Regehr's first rodeo. He has learned from experience that those who have participated in negotiations know that emotions are a real negative for making a very good, smart, rational decisions. Regehr told me that he believes that teh Fehr brothers are smart negotiators. Thus, the players are following the good examples set forth by their leaders.
“The owners know that we as players are emotional. I think they want to use that against us in this negotiation. Guys are emotional, and can get wound up and things like that so we have to realize that. We see right through that. We have to take a couple of deep breaths and say “Where were we?” “Where are we now?” “Where do we want to be? ‘How is this all going”? When you do that, you can all along that the league has had a plan in mind, and a date that a lot of people talk about that they say “Ok. We’re going squeeze these guys as much as we can until this certain date, then we’re going to come to them and say now let’s finally make a deal”. Now, I don’t know what that date is, nobody knows. Do you? I don’t. What they (the owners) are trying to do right now is toy with the emotions (of the NHLPA). I think you’ve seen that in three or four different instances along the way. In mid-October, they made the “50/50” and everyone was like “oh, it’s so close”…. Then a couple weeks go by and nothing. It’s happened along those lines and we (the players) have to realize that”.
Regehr, like many of his Sabres teammates, and fans of the NHL, likened this ugly, protracted lockout to a rollercoaster. He and his fellow NHLPA brethren have learned how to deal with highest highs and how to react appropriately to the lowest lows. NHLPA executive director, Donald Fehr and his brother Steve, have been instrumental in managing the players’ expectations of this difficult labor negotiation.
I asked Regehr if it can be that easy as dialing out the emotion of focusing 100% attention on the issues.
“No. It can’t be”, he told me.
“If you look at the big picture, where both sides were in the last agreement (2004-05), from where we were to where we are now, what’s happened is its been really one-sided. I think in concessions, the players have made the vast majority of the concessions. On the owners side, there’s been a few little things here and there, but there hasn’t been anything meaningful that has come back (to the players from the owners), so there’s no deal to be made right now. All that they are doing is waiting for more and more and more, and that is kind of the feeling that I’ve been getting. Its time, I thnk, to look at other options.
Kind of like what Ryan Miller said after Thursday’s negotiations took a turn for the worse. Its kind of like negotiating with yourselves as a group?
“Yeah. Have you ever talked with Gary Bettman? How did that go for you? Enough said”.
Regehr has been an active participant in the negotiating process over the course of the past 83 days. He’s flown to New York to sit in on NHLPA meetings. He has had many conversations with the Fehr brothers. Regehr applauds Fehr for keeping his head about him, despite the many smear tactics and face washes that Bettman and the owners have used against him during this stressful time.
“ I think they (Bettman and the owners) have operated and how he’s been extremely open and transparent. How many players has he gotten involved in the process? Players are showing up to the meetings and its kind of interesting because the league saw that and they tried at one point to say that they don’t want players in the meetings. These are negotiations, what do they have to be afraid of? The other one was maybe a month ago when they said that Don wasn’t portraying our proposals correctly to the NHLPA membership, when he truly is. I don’t think that the PA membership has been as knowledgeable and informed as they are now. I think the owners see that and the want to go after Don”.
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While the NHLPA and the owners are waging a cold war against one another, one prominent NHLer has found a new long term home in Russia. May other NHLers follow his lead?
The Ryan O’Reilly cold case has been cracked. When the September 15 deadline forced the NHL lockout, it left high profile RFAs O’Reilly and PK Subban on the outside of the league looking in. The Colorado Avalanche and its fans will not be happy to hear that their restricted free agent power forward has signed a two year contract to play in the KHL. O’Reilly was Colorado’s leading scorer last season (18 goals 27 assists in 81 games)
From
Ria Novosti:
Colorado Avalanche forward Ryan O'Reilly has signed for KHL team Metallurg Magnitogorsk on a two-year deal, the Russians said Friday.
O'Reilly, 21, joins his older brother Cal and Pittsburgh Penguins center Evgeni Malkin at the team in the Ural mountains, a leading force in the KHL's Eastern Conference.
O'Reilly is a restricted free agent in the NHL, and Metallurg suggested he would stay in Russia unless an NHL team outbid the Russians for his services.
"It has been agreed by mutual consent that if Ryan is offered a contract on more lucrative terms in the National Hockey League, Metallurg will not interfere in that contract being concluded," the team said in a website statement.
Metallurg did not say how much O'Reilly will be paid in Russia.
The Canadian becomes the first big NHL name to move to Russia on a permanent contract since the lockout began, in a move that symbolises the KHL's growing ability to compete with its more illustrious North American rival.
He is unlikely to play alongside his brother soon, after Cal O'Reilly departed for New York for an operation in the coming days, but Metallurg said it did not rule out the duo being on the ice together this season.
Ryan O'Reilly has spent three seasons with the Avalanche, scoring 39 goals and 68 assists in 236 NHL games, and was the team's top scorer last season.
Cal O'Reilly played 113 games for three NHL teams, scoring 13 goals and 28 assists, before moving to Metallurg in the summer as a free agent.
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