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Nice job..Much of what happened in this negotiation can be uderstood, IMHO, if one accepts the premise that the league wanted the season to be cancelled, and wants to break the union..by declaring an impasse, imposing a new contract, and opening next season with replacement players and those union members who chose to cross the picket lines..

1. Everything you said about the mistakes the league made is correct..However, once the expansion plan was begun, it had to be completed, otherwise the legal problems would have been monumetal. That's why the NHL twice extended a bad, money losing, CBA..they had no choice..

2. The current math is obvious..the owners lose LESS by NOT playing, than if they played...so it's a no-brainer..

3. And despite what Bettman says, the ONLY way the league can regain popularity AND a solid financial footing is through a restructuring..a contraction of maybe 4-7 teams...If they tried to do this while operating under a CBA, it would require huge negotiations with the union, because you'd be eliminating 100-200 players' jobs, and also the terms of any disperal draft..it would be a nightmare..The best, nay the only way to do this is AFTER an impasse had been declared, and new rules imposed by the league..

Bettman is out to break the union..Remember the counter-offer to the players' 25% roll-back? The league proposed a deal that would exempt ANY player making less than $800k..

4.So now, when the league next comes back with say a $32 million cap..they'll again exempt two-thirds of the players from any cut..and put the onus entirely on the high-paid players to give back their excessive salaries..Classic divide and conquer..

The union is dominated by the agents, and they are only concerned about the high paid superstars..Unlike the UAW, where everyone is paid about the same..in sports you have a HUGE disparity between league journeymen, and the superstars..the league is exploiting this disparity..The majority of players earning less than a million, having lost one year's pay, will NOT do so again..

5. The first rule of war, and politics..is KNOW they enemy. Bettman came from the NBA..he was Stern's right-hand -man for many years..and look what Stern did to the players. He broke the union with the lockout...imposed the salary cap...The NHLPA never read Lord Acton..

The only problem with your assessment is that two key items cannot be reconciled. How can the NHL divide the players' union between the "high-paid" and "low-paid" players if the league is eventually going to contract anyway? If some guy making $800,000 decides to cross the "picket line" and accept the NHL's terms, then by this time next year he's going to be losing his job to a former $3 million player who settles for $1.5 million in a league that has about 20% fewer teams.

Your analysis might be correct, but I think the biggest obstacle to the contraction of the league is not the players -- it's the owners. Not just the owners of those teams that would go out of business, but every owner who purchased his team or paid a hefty expansion fee under the inflated values of the 1990s.

There are two books I recommend to anyone who wants a historical perspective about how the NHL came to its current woes: Net Worth by David Cruise and Alison Griffiths and Game Misconduct by Russ Conway.

Net Worth is the most comprehensive economic history of the NHL up to the early 1990's, with special emphasis on the pre-NHLPA days, the Alan Eagleson era and the NHL pension scandal.

Game Misconduct is the book that really exposed the nature and extent of Alan Eagleson's frauds and conflicts of interest. The book will help you understand why Eagleson got away with it all for so long, and why it took the U.S. media to expose him.