ANDREW FRANCIS WALLACE/TORONTO STAR
Donald Fehr's ascension to the top job in the NHL Players' Association left key questions unanswered.
By Damien Cox
Sports Columnist
You could argue, and some would, that the genesis of the current impasse between the NHL and the NHL Players’ Association lies in the deals signed by the NBA and NFL over the past year.
Once those leagues arrived at approximately a 50-50 split of league revenues, well, you knew the NHL would be bound and determined to get the same thing.
But there’s a more telling moment, and event, to reach back to when you really want to focus on why we are where we are in this hockey mess.
Try Aug. 31, 2009.
That was the day, or in the early hours of that day before dawn, that Paul Kelly, then executive director of the NHLPA, was given the shiv after less than two years on the job.
Why? Well, it was a coup orchestrated behind the scenes by union lawyer Ian Penny and ex-ombudsman Eric Lindros, and carried out in public by players like Andrew Ference, Matt Stajan and others.
Driving the coup, along with personal rivalries, was the suggestion that Kelly, despite his impressive record as a U.S. attorney, wasn’t tough enough and wasn’t experienced enough as a negotiator to take on the NHL and Gary Bettman.
What he had done was establish a cordial working relationship with Bettman. He’d even been invited to speak to the owners at a meeting in Pebble Beach, and that didn’t sit right with some.
Ultimately, a report was done on this shameful episode in NHLPA history, a report that has never seen the light of day or been made public.
Kelly’s dismissal set in motion a series of events.
First, former baseball union head Don Fehr, who was on the phone with members of the coup later in the same day that Kelly was fired, became a consultant for the NHLPA. He’d been denied a spot on the advisory committee on Kelly’s recommendation several months earlier.
Fehr advised the union on how it needed to build a new infrastructure and then in December 2010, 16 months after Kelly had been fired, took over as executive director.
From that point until last month, a period of 20 months, Fehr declined to engage in any serious collective bargaining, and for much of the time he rejected NHL overtures, saying he was still learning the business.
On Thursday, he walked into a significant meeting with several NHL owners 90 minutes late, plopped down two single sheets of paper, each with a different skeleton proposal to the owners that didn’t include any ideas on systemic issues, then verbally delivered a third proposal with no accompanying paperwork. For all three proposals, he acknowledged to the owners he hadn’t actually “run the numbers.”
This from the leader of a union in a $3 billion business.
Fehr, despite being asked, has never revealed what was in the Kelly Report or what his involvement was in the sacking of his predecessor.
The intriguing question, more than three years after Kelly’s dismissal, is whether this entire episode in NHL-NHLPA bargaining would have unfolded differently had Kelly remained as executive director.
Retired journalist Russ Conway, who was honoured by the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1999, largely for his investigative work into union mismanagement under Alan Eagleson that ultimately landed the former NHLPA boss in jail, said at a minimum Kelly would have started negotiating with the NHL much earlier.
“Perhaps as early as July 2011,” said Conway, regarded as an expert on NHL-NHLPA relations. “They had a relationship building. The knock on him was that he was too soft, but he was a masterful negotiator. You don’t do all those plea agreements and fight all those cases for the Justice department without being a good negotiator.”
With Fehr in charge, Conway sees similarities with the dynamics of the union during the Eagleson years.
“For years, the players wouldn’t ask Eagleson the tough questions,” he said. “Tell me, is Sidney Crosby asking Fehr tough questions?”
At the time of his dismissal, Kelly was fully informed on all union issues, had a working relationship with key league personnel and had already spearheaded mid-term modifications to an international rights agreement for the NHL and NHLPA. His right-hand man was former NHL goalie Glenn Healy.
Fehr took months to get up to speed, and then engaged his brother Steve as outside counsel to help in the negotiations. Neither Fehr brother had any experience in hockey.
The delays that accompanied Don Fehr’s acclimatization to the job helped push the current negotiations into this fall.
Maybe Kelly, had he stayed, would have run into a stone wall and been frustrated by yet another round of heavy concessions demanded by the NHL. But more would have been done long before the Sept. 15 deadline, long before players started missing paycheques.
The players deserved better. Dumping Kelly just put them way behind. Now, they’re paying the price.
