NEW YORK CITY, NY (NEWS1130) – There will be no last-ditch attempt to avoid another NHL lockout.

With just hours remaining on the collective bargaining agreement, deputy commissioner Bill Daly says he doesn’t expect any formal negotiations to take place before it expired at 11:59 p.m. ET/8:59 p.m. PT on Saturday.

If that ends up being the case, the NHL and NHL Players’ Association will have let the remaining three days slip past without returning to the bargaining table. The league says it informed the NHLPA in November that it was unwilling to play past the expiration of the current contract and it never wavered on that view.

The deadline was expected to pass without any formal announcement. The sides last sat down together on Wednesday, with each tabling a proposal, and commissioner Gary Bettman indicated he expects the next move to come from the union.

“We made the last offer and we haven’t gotten a formal response to our proposal,” Bettman said Thursday. “I hope we get one and one that recognizes that we made yet another meaningful move and we’re trying to engage in a negotiation.”

The impact of the lockout will be felt immediately. The first pre-season games are expected to be cancelled next week and the possibility of having the regular season start as scheduled on Oct. 11 will become less and less likely with each passing day.

During the lockout that wiped out the entire 2004-05 season, both the league and individual teams decided to lay off employees. On Saturday, Daly said the NHL has no plans to cut staff “at this point in time.”

A number of players are expected to seek alternative opportunities in Europe, with the Russian-based KHL offering the most financial appeal. Switzerland, Sweden and Finland will also likely be popular destinations.

Players aren’t scheduled to receive the first of 13 NHL paycheques this season until Oct. 15 — something they’ll miss if the lockout extends past that date. There are no immediate plans for them to receive a stipend from the union.

Even the main negotiators will stop being paid. Bettman and Daly both committed to giving up their salary during the lockout while NHLPA executive director Donald Fehr stopped collecting a paycheque at the start of July as a sign of solidarity with his membership.

With the sides struggling to agree on how to divide up $3.28 billion in annual revenues, both lamented the damage that is bound to be inflicted by engaging in another work stoppage.

For the last several weeks, all of the secondary issues have been pushed aside so that talks could focus solely on the league’s core economic system.

The NHL believes too much money is being paid out in salaries and has proposed a system to address it. They’re calling for the players’ share in revenue to be set at 49 per cent next season — down from 57 per cent in the expiring deal — and proposed that it drops to 47 per cent by the end of the six-year deal.

The union tabled an offer where the salary cap would be set to fixed increases of two per cent, four per cent and six per cent over the next three years. The system would then revert to a percentage-based system for the final two years.

And so the NHL heads into its fourth work stoppage in two decades.

An 11-day strike in April 1992 caused 30 games to be postponed, while a 103-day lockout in 1994-95 forced the cancellation of 468 games and delayed the season’s start until Jan. 20. The 2004 lockout began Sept. 16 and wasn’t settled until July 13 — making the NHL the first North American sports league to ever cancel an entire season over a labour dispute.