NHL, NHLPA united by 'common spirit' in forging Return to Play Plan

They're in this together.

The NHL and the NHL Players' Association were headed down the stretch of another season of record-breaking revenues when they screeched to a halt March 12 due to concerns surrounding the coronavirus.

Suddenly, they faced a situation the League had not seen since 1919, when the Stanley Cup was not awarded due to the Spanish flu.

Not only did they come up with the Return to Play Plan, they hammered out a four-year extension to the NHL/NHLPA Collective Bargaining Agreement, relying on each other for their health and the game's health now and into the future.

NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman called it perhaps an "unprecedented collaboration and problem-solving."

"I wouldn't even say it approached a negotiation," the Commissioner said.

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NHLPA executive director Don Fehr said for all practical purposes it couldn't have been normal collective bargaining.

"We had to work with them and there had to be a common spirit, or we were going to be stuck in this morass," Fehr said. "Negotiations are never easy, and they're more complicated in the circumstances in which we now live. But all of us, I think, recognized the singular nature of the crisis and of the issues and the necessity to persevere until we got it done."

The Return to Play Plan is out of this world, in the sense that it's like rocket science and completely alien.

"I'm so impressed that we're able to get to this point," Tampa Bay Lightning general manager Julien BriseBois said. "I don't want to say that this was exactly like putting a man on the moon in 1969. It wasn't that complex, but this was pretty complex."

Twelve Eastern Conference teams in Toronto. Twelve Western Conference teams in Edmonton. The top four teams in each conference will play a three-game round-robin for Stanley Cup Playoff seeding, while the others will play best-of-5 series in the Stanley Cup Qualifiers starting Aug. 1.

The playoffs will be four rounds of best-of-7 series, with the conference finals and the Stanley Cup Final in Edmonton ending as late as Oct. 4.

All this without fans in the stands, with players and staff living in a bubble the entire time and lots of logistical issues.

"We've kind of joked that it's like going to Mars," said former NHL defenseman Mathieu Schneider, Fehr's special assistant. "No one's ever been in there, so we're going to have to be there and make changes on the fly as we go, and we'll have to work through things."

Commissioner Bettman said the NHL talked about reducing the first two rounds of the playoffs to best-of-5 series to shorten the time the players would be in the bubble, and it was the players who said no. They wanted best-of-7 so this championship will be earned on the same basis as usual.

"That to me was impressive, because the integrity of the Return to Play system was paramount in everybody's mind," the Commissioner said.

Along with health and safety.

Schneider said there's a very good chance the players will be safer in the bubble after the teams arrive in the hub cities July 26 because everyone will have tested negative for a period of time before entering the bubble. Everyone -- players and staff -- must follow strict protocols and will continue to be tested.

"Everybody is relying on everybody else, and everybody's going to be doing what they have to do to make sure that to the extent, to the greatest extent possible, we can provide the safest environment possible," Fehr said. "That's really important."

In 1918-19, the NHL was in its second season. It had three teams, all in eastern Canada. The Stanley Cup series between the Montreal Canadiens and the Seattle Metropolitans of the Pacific Coast Hockey Association was canceled after five games.

Now the League has more than a century of history. It has 31 teams across North America, with another expansion team in Seattle set to begin play in 2021-22. It is a multibillion-dollar business with a salary cap, making this a unique challenge.

Under the previous collective bargaining agreement, a percentage of the players' salaries was held in escrow to ensure a 50-50 split of hockey-related revenue between the players and the owners. With revenues set to fall because of the pandemic, escrow was set to skyrocket. The new agreement will cap it, starting at 20 percent next season and descending to 6 percent by 2023-24.

"From our standpoint," Commissioner Bettman said, "we believed it was important to adhere to the fundamentals of our system but at the same time restructure it to moderate the impact on both sides, which is how we've in effect dealt with the shortfalls that are occurring or likely to occur with an attempt to smooth it out, and I think we've accomplished that."

The extension runs through 2025-26, giving the NHL and the NHLPA six years of stability at an otherwise uncertain time.

"I think Don and I both recognized that labor peace was something that we couldn't even quantify how important it was," the Commissioner said. "But we both knew for the business of the game to come back strong, for the game itself to come back strong, there was enough disruption going on in the world that we didn't have to add to it."

NHL.com staff writer Amalie Benjamin contributed to this report