Team owners, players renew talks to end lockout

Negotiators for National Hockey League players and team owners resumed talks on a new collective bargaining agreement on Tuesday in their first full face-to-face talks since Oct.18. Club owners and players have remained deadlocked on how to divide $3.3 billion in revenues since the old deal expired on Sept.15. Pittsburgh Penguins star Sidney Crosby, who scored the winning over-time goal for Canada in the gold medal final at the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics, was among the players who attended the session at an undisclosed site. “The players’ view has always been that you ought to keep negotiating until you find a way to get an agreement and stay at it day by day so it’s very good to be getting back to the table,” players union executive director Don Fehr said. The league has already wiped out the first 326 regular-season games through Nov.30 and the Winter Classic outdoor game that had been scheduled for New Year’s Day as a result of the bargaining stalemate. With 26.5 per cent of games already scrapped, the latest talks were seen as a hopeful step in trying to avoid a repeat of the bitter 2004-2005 dispute, when an entire season was lost to money issues for the only time in North American sport history. More games figure to be wiped out if the sides cannot close out a deal. The NHL reportedly has revised its plan to allow players to receive the value of their existing contracts with money from owners rather than from fellow players, but the “make-whole” plan has yet to be agreed upon.