Well, no need to fret over the need to break a tie. The NHL's collective bargaining agreement has been hammered out and the scoreboard is chock full of winners and losers.

Forget overtime. Forget a shootout. The most acrimonious labor dispute in the history of North American pro sports, which produced the regrettable legacy of the lost 2004-05 season, ultimately delivered a landslide victory for the owners.

For the players? Sweet mother of Maurice Richard, what a beating they took.

The players said they would never accept a salary cap. They said linkage, drawing a direct correlation between the league's gross revenues and their outlandish paychecks (average pay of some $1.8 million in the Old World NHL), was absolutely out of the question. In the end, they got a cap, and they also got linkage, and they also got a 24 percent discount on all existing deals.

To borrow a scoring summary from long, long ago, the new CBA has the look of Montreal Canadiens 12, California Golden Seals 1.

The Just Say No Players Association said NO for so long, that when it came time actually to make a deal, as in bargain from intelligence and strength and good faith, the JSNPA was left to do little more than acquiesce to whatever ownership dictated. Oh, and for that, they also surrendered all of their 2004-05 earnings, at least $1 billion.

Little wonder that the Kings' Sean Avery, frustrated and spewing venom in the days leading up to the deal being announced, said he felt he had been "brainwashed" by union boss Bob Goodenow. It was the iron-fisted Goodenow, in the hours leading up to the lockout last September, who bravely reminded owners that it's not wise to challenge hockey players to a fight. That proved to be obsolete thinking — and there's a bit of irony in that, too. For better or worse, fighting became obsolete in the NHL in the early- and mid-90s. In this case, the players chose to pick a fight with logic — ownership's compelling reasons to gain cost certainty — and the harder they fought, they only succeeded in beating themselves into submission.

A look at the many winners and losers left standing in the dawn of a new day for the NHL.

Winner: Owners
No more excuses for these guys. If they continue their mad dash to bankruptcy courts across the land, a la the Penguins and Sabres and Senators, they won't be able to point to player payroll as the root cause of their economic bumblings and stumblings.

They entered the lockout behind the unstated battle cry of "Give us cost certainty or give us death," and they damn near got both.

Now they all can make a buck, with payrolls capped at $39 million, and perhaps more importantly, they all can expect their franchise equity values to grow. As other sports leagues have seen franchise valuations upwards of $1 billion, or more, members of the Original 30 realized very little appreciation through the '90s and into the new millennium. With salary costs contained, the whole product is far more Forbes-friendly.

Loser: Players
Yeow, what were they thinking? Actually, what, if anything, were they thinking?

Do we chalk it up to greed or stupidity? Middle ground, perhaps, is naivete, or simple conditioning. As a group, these guys had it so good over the past 10-12 years, with ham ’n egg forwards and defensemen routinely making $2 million a year, they had every reason to expect that the financial gravy train never would stop. They somehow forgot that a guy such as Ray Bourque, who signed for $100,000 a year in 1979, had won three Norris Trophies by the spring of 1990 and was still on Boston's books for roughly $500,000 a year.

In the ’90s, thanks to Goodenow, and in part because owners stayed up nights inventing ways to make the CBA hyper-inflationary, the salaries got too good, too fast. The owners got downright stupid with their spending, lavishing riches on players young and old, and the economic culture ultimately convinced the labor force that the few wooden sticks still used in the game were carved from some humongous money tree out there in fairyland forest (found at the southern edge of Central Park in New York).

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By the end (read: pre-lockout), average NHL pay was approaching $1.9 million. Now, after the rollbacks, the cap and linkage, who knows? It wouldn't be a surprise to see an immediate drop of 30, maybe 40 percent.

Even at 40 percent, they still will be over $1 million a year. Not bad. But remember, they lost a minimum of $1 billion when the season was canned. Had they been proactive about accepting a cap, they could have kept the $1 billion, and probably wouldn't have seen as severe a trim in average salary.

The union will try to spin it otherwise, but overall it adds up to a devastating, humiliating defeat.

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