Despite all disingenuous claims to the contrary, the NHL and NHLPA did not do everything in their power to end the lockout and prevent yesterday’s cancellation of the hockey season. Throughout the collective-bargaining process, the two sides spent far too much time focusing on their public relations battle, and far too little time attempting to bridge the gap between them. The cost of this avoidable catastrophe will be measured in the billions of dollars, and the embarrassment the league has brought upon itself will take years to reverse.

This doesn’t mean, however, that the two sides should share equal blame. Throughout the negotiating process, the union made the majority of the concessions. Their December offer to accept an immediate 24% pay cut opened up new avenues for negotiation, while their belated acceptance of the salary-cap principle earlier this week set off the frantic final push to make a deal.

The league’s stance, meanwhile, remained essentially the same from their initial proposal, which offered to give the players 53% of the league’s revenue (which came in at $2.1 billion in 2003-04), to their final proposal of a $42.5 million cap with a 50% tax on all payroll dollars spent beyond $34 million. It is worth noting that despite six months of acrimonious negotiations and much rhetoric about “compromise” solutions, the total amount of money the players could reasonably have expected to earn under each offer was almost identical – somewhere in around $1.1 billion.

Throughout the past six months, NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman has demonstrated no inclination to negotiate, and his intransigence repeatedly threw up hurdles in the bargaining process. The final example of this behavior came when he stuck by his take-it-or-leave-it offer on Monday night, leaving no room to reach a deal when the two sides were tantalizingly close to reaching a compromise.

During yesterday’s press conference, Bettman claimed that the two sides remained $200 million apart. In order to reach that figure, he multiplied the $6.5 million difference between the two salary-cap proposals by the league’s 30 teams. But the implicit assumption that every team in the league would push the upper limits of a $49 million cap stretches the truth to a stunning degree – only nine teams spent more than $49 million in 2003-04, and that number would have decreased next year with the players’ proposed 24% payroll reduction.

Furthermore, in the NHLPA’s final proposal, any team spending between $40 million and the $49 million salary cap would face a $4.5 million tax bill. Spending beyond that limit – an opportunity available to each team only twice during the union’s proposed six-year agreement – would carry with it a 150% tax. Only payrolls below $40 million would not be taxed under the NHLPA’s plan. Even in the unlikely event that the average payroll would hit that $40 mil lion threshold, the players would earn a total of $1.2 billion.

Bettman claims that the NHL’s teams would be drawn to the $49 million cap as if it were a “magnet,” as though the prospect of paying $4.5 million in taxes would not deter that behavior. If that is really the case, perhaps the problem here is not the players’ intractability, but the owners’ inability to operate their businesses in an intelligent manner. Of course, one is also left to wonder what exactly the $135 million in tax revenue would be used for.

To be fair, union chief Bob Goodenow also deserves plenty of blame. Paid to look out for the players’ best interests, he has played a major role in depriving them of a full year’s salary.

Though it might have pained Goodenow to do so, capitulating yesterday for the good of the game would have ultimately saved the players from tremendous, unrecoverable losses. Even in the best-case scenario, it is unlikely that any future deal will approach the value of the NHL’s final offer on Monday.

Needless to say, it is time for both sides to find new leaders. Bettman and Goodenow have done a terrible job in their failed attempts to broker a deal. This was never more apparent than during Bettman’s press conference yesterday, when he admitted that the league might have considered a salary cap in the $44 million range. Clearly, neither Bettman nor Goodenow saw fit to explore every possible option, and there can be no greater condemnation of their efforts.

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One of the more telling moments of yesterday’s proceedings arose after a Finnish reporter asked Bettman when he had last watched a hockey game in person. After answering that he had attended the World Junior Championships in January, Bettman pointed out that he hasn’t had much time for “leisure” activities over the past few months. That the commissioner of the world’s most important hockey league views watching hockey as leisure says a lot about the sorry state of the sport.

The NHL sells its product as a populist sport, but it has evolved into anything but. Unable to enforce its on-ice rules, the league allows its worst teams to neutralize their talent deficiencies with clutch-and-grab tactics. Its love-hate relationship with fighting has delivered a hypocritical message that appeals to neither its bloodthirsty nor its pacifist fans.

Despite skyrocketing ticket prices and the relocation of franchises from traditional hockey markets to Nascar country, the NHL has never developed an effective marketing plan. Television ratings have sunk to the point where hockey seems to be only slightly more compelling than John McEnroe’s ill-fated talk show. None of these issues has anything to do with “cost certainty.” Yet each one arguably impacts the game as much as the $6.5 million difference in salary-cap figures.

In the midst of baseball’s steroid scandal and in the wake of the Pacers-Pistons brawl, it says quite a lot for the NHL that it has managed to become professional sports’ biggest embarrassment this winter. That the two sides could not find a way to acceptably share an annual windfall of $2 billion despite hockey’s many woes and its rapidly declining popularity is a travesty of epic proportions.

Mr. Greenstein is the editor in chief of InsideHockey.com.