It's common for negotiations to go down to the last minute. With 10 days to go until the NHL’s collective bargaining agreement expires, both commissioner Gary Bettman and NHLPA executive Donald Fehr have their arms crossed and haven't sat at the negotiating table since Friday. When they’ll talk next is anyone’s guess, as reports have suggested they don’t have any further negotiating sessions planned.

"We'll be prepared to resume when they are," Fehr told reporters after the last session. "Hopefully, that won't be too long."

Sounds promising, right? The sides obviously remain far apart in their proposals, as there’s major disagreement regarding the division of money. Essentially the owners want the players to give more money back so all the teams – including the ones that don’t make money like the Blue Jackets, Coyotes and Islanders – can be profitable. That could of course also be solved with better revenue sharing among the clubs, but that would mean less money for the thriving teams.

Under the current (for the next week and change, anyway) CBA, players get 57 percent of hockey-related revenue. The league’s first offer called for that to drop to 46 percent, and its second offer was for 50 percent (the calculation of hockey-related revenue has been in dispute as well – the NHLPA saw that 46 as 43, according to reports). 

The NHLPA has yet to give an official counterproposal to the league’s most recent offer, but the aforementioned offer would reduce the salary cap to $58 million. That would be a problem for teams with cap figures already higher than that. Speaking of which, guess which team has nearly $68.9 million against the cap already for the coming season?

Even if they put Marc Savard on long-term injured reserve (something they did in the 2010-11 season but not last year), the Bruins would still have a be a shade under $7 million over the cap for the coming season if the NHLPA were to have taken that deal. With no common ground and no negotiatons planned for the time being, the likelihood of a lockout is growing bigger with each passing day. The bigger question may be how long that lockout would last.   

Money aside, we’ve touched on a few reasons as to why another lockout wouldn’t be the greatest thing in the world (such as the potential confusion it could potentially provide the status of Dougie Hamilton), but here are a few more: 

THE BRUINS WOULD MISS THE EASY PART OF THEIR SCHEDULE

The Eastern Conference got better over the offseason, so regular-season points (not that playoff points are a thing) will be harder to come by for the B's. If the season starts late, the Bruins will miss out on the ones that would have been attainable via an easy early schedule.

Only two of Bruins' first 10 games of the season -- the first two games, to be exact -- are against teams that made the playoffs last season (Flyers, Devils). Five of their first 18 are against such teams, though they should also face challenges from teams that improved in the offseason such as the Hurricanes and Wild. 

As bad as the Bruins were to begin the season last year, they don't have the excuse of fatigue this time around, so they should be salivating at the opportunity to pick up points against weaker teams early on. Unfortunately for them, a late start to the season could mean hockey could get started just in time for a very tough stretch in Boston's schedule.

Once the Bruins get to late November (remember, pressure to get the NBC games in could make these sides resolve things in order to start the season in time for the Black Friday game between the Bruins and Rangers), the real grind starts for the B's. Beginning with that contest, the Bruins will face the Rangers, Devils and Hurricanes in consecutive games, and December features contests against the Coyotes, Red Wings, Penguins, Kings, and Canucks, with other 2011-12 playoff teams like the Capitals and Senators also in there. Over a nine-game stretch from Dec. 10-29, only two of the Bruins' opponents (the Lightning -- who split their four-game series with Boston last year -- and the Jets) did not make the playoffs last season. In other words, the Bruins' schedule goes from easy to difficult pretty quickly, and it does so right around the time the league will be pressured to start the season. 

PLAYERS ARE GETTING READY TO PLAY ELSEWHERE

Players are becoming more accepting of the likelihood that they will be locked out, so that means agents are working the phones at this point to find their clients work for the 2012-13 season. 

Of course, nothing can be made official until the players are actually locked out, so for now the talks with European teams center around getting things close to in place for when the CBA expires. After all, there will be thousands of players looking for work, so the jobs will fill quickly.

THE WORST-CASE SCENARIO WOULD HURT THE B’S EXTRA-HARD 

Both sides may feel that a lockout is inevitable, but it certainly hasn’t gotten to the point that anyone should worry about losing an entire season like they did in 2004-05.

If that were to happen, which is obviously the worst-case scenario for a league that is making money after recovering from the last time they lost a season to CBA negations, the Bruins would be hit extra-hard by it. Thirty-five year-old Zdeno Chara is still in his prime (and figures to be for quite some time given how well he takes care of himself), but losing a season of competing with Chara would be like the Patriots losing a season of competing with Tom Brady. 

With Tim Thomas out of the picture, the Bruins have a veteran club that isn’t exactly old. The oldest forward among their top-six is 27-year-old Patrice Bergeron, and they only have three forwards 30 years or older in Shawn Thornton (35), Chris Kelly (31) and Rich Peverley (30). On the blueline, Chara, Andrew Ference (33) and Dennis Seidenberg (31) are all getting up there, but they have a star in the making in 19-year-old Dougie Hamilton, along with a couple veterans in their twenties in Adam McQuaid (25) and Johnny Boychuk (28).

Though they have key players in the final years of their deals and their futures could change things, the Bruins – as they stand now, at least – figure to be Stanley Cup contenders for as long as they have Chara. If the NHL were to lose a season, the B’s would lose a season of their best player’s prime.