NHL AND NHLPA REACH DEAL ON COLLECTIVE BARGAINING AGREEMENT

After 113 days and a 16-hour negotiation marathon that wrapped up at 5am et on Sunday morning, a tentative deal on a new 10-year collective bargaining agreement has been reached between the National Hockey League and NHL Players’ Association.

“Don Fehr and I are here to tell you that we have reached an agreement on the framework of a new collective bargaining agreement, the details of which need to be put to paper,” NHL commissioner Gary Bettman confirmed to reporters early Sunday morning. “We have to dot a lot of I’s and cross a lot of T’s. There is still a lot of work to be done, but the basic framework has been agreed upon.”

The next stage is documentation and ratification of the deal, with the start date and number of games in the 2012-13 season still to be announced depending on how long the final process takes.

“Hopefully we’re at a place where all those things will proceed fairly rapidly and with some dispatch,” said NHLPA executive director Donald Fehr. “We’ll get back to business as usual just as fast as we can. Hopefully within a very few days the fans can get back to watching people who are skating, not the two of us.”