On average, an NHL player’s career lasts about four seasons. If the 2004-05 season falls by the wayside, the average player will have lost 25% of his potential career earnings – and that figure will climb if the labor dispute stretches into next season. In other words, the coming weeks will go a long way toward determining just how badly the players miss those paychecks.

The players union made what appeared to be a good-faith effort to kick-start negotiations with the owners back on December 9, when they offered to roll back their salaries by 24%. But the owners balked because the proposal failed to tie player salaries directly to league revenues.

With the two sides once again at a standstill, it has become increasingly clear that the players will need to step up with another proposal if the season is to be saved. A collective bargaining process normally requires give and take from both sides, but in this case, the owners appear to have all the leverage and a lion’s share of the public’s support.

“We’ve told the NHLPA that we need for there to be an enforceable and predictable relationship between our revenues and our player costs,” NHL Senior Vice President Bill Daly said yesterday in an interview with The New York Sun. “It is essential in this negotiation, because over the last 10 years of the expired CBA, our player costs rose at a far more rapid rate than our revenues, and as a result ended up in a relationship that was unsustainable going forward.”

This sounds reasonable on the surface. The NHL is looking for a partnership in which the players’ compensation is directly tied to the league’s overall economic strength. Unfortunately, the league has had a contentious relationship with the union for the past 40 years, and given the current climate, it is hard to imagine the players embracing such a partnership.

In truth, though, the players don’t have a choice, unless they wish to continue playing at cut rates in Europe or in a new start-up league. From the stars who have lost millions of dollars to the grinders whose NHL dreams are fading by the second, the players have far more to lose in this dispute than do the owners.

Mike Modano, for one, is getting antsy. According to the National Post of Canada, the Dallas Stars center – who stands to lose $9 million in salary this season – indicated that players will be desperate to start earning NHL-level salaries again if the lockout isn’t resolved by the start of next season.

“It’s going to be tough to come back in October and say that we’re going to stay tough and stand firm. You’re going to have guys who are saying, ‘What are we doing?'” Modano told the paper yesterday. “You’re going to have guys chomping at the bit to get a deal done.”

But unless the union develops a proposal that comes closer to guaranteeing the owners some form of cost certainty, no progress will be made. Two weeks ago, NHLPA Senior Director Ted Saskin told the Sun that the union would under no circumstances accept a salary cap.

“If the owners’ goal is to get a salary cap as the only mechanism for reducing costs, they’re insisting on the one method that is not acceptable to us,” Saskin said. “We do want to talk about ways to meaningfully reduce labor costs, but we’re not interested in setting a salary cap at a level lower than the marketplace would freely dictate.”

So what, then, is the solution? An oft-discussed alternative for cost-reduction is a luxury tax, where teams would be forced to pay a penalty if their payroll exceeded a predetermined limit. Much like a salary cap, that threshold could bebased upon a percentage of league revenues.

“The problem with a luxury tax is that it’s unpredictable, and by definition, what you’re doing is making a best guess of the effect on behavior,” Daly said. “Given that we lost $500 million the last two years, we’re not in a position as a league to be employing a system of best-guesses.”

Of course, if the tax were to be $10 on every dollar spent above the league-proposed $38.6 million team payroll threshold, it’s unlikely that any team – even the free-spending Rangers – would dare exceed it. But as Daly put it, “If the tax would effectively act as a cap, why not just accept a cap?”

The NHL’s most recent proposal to the union would have required that teams raise their payrolls by as much as $23 million (in the case of the Pittsburgh Penguins). Daly reiterated with confidence that each team would be able to ice a roster with a payroll of between $34.6 and $38.6 million, saying that the league would help clubs like the Penguins field payrolls within the prescribed range.

The union has acknowledged that a systemic drag on player salaries is needed, and it is for this reason that they proposed a luxury tax along with the 24% salary rollback. The question, then, is how to guarantee the results. On this issue, the finger pointing persists.

“We want to talk about ways to meaningfully reduce labor costs,” Saskin said. “What this should be about – for the NHL – is figuring out how to reduce labor costs.”

Daly, for his part, put this challenge to the union: “If the union is really serious about cost controls, as they suggest they are, I would suggest that it’s incumbent upon them to present a system that really intends cost control.”

Sooner or later, the players must realize that the owners have far less to lose if the season falls by the wayside. At some point, whether today or in 18 months, the owners will use that leverage to impose a collective bargaining agreement that directly ties player costs to league revenues.

The owners’ revenues may have decreased precipitously leading to that moment. But by tying player costs directly to team revenues, they will ensure that their 30 franchises can still operate profitably, whether the NHL is a $2 billion or a $1 billion business. For the current crop of players, however, there will be no way to ever recover the $1 billion in salary (or more) that will have been lost forever.

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