The lockout is over, and though everyone in the room – maybe with the exception of mediator Scot Beckenbaugh – ends up a loser for the fact that it lasted 113 days, Donald Fehr can say he won. 

When things looked their best, the NHLPA’s executive director appeared to be a moving target, willing to change what was the players’ most pressing need whenever necessary as a means of improving the league’s offers. When things looked their worst, he was villainized by the owners and painted as someone who was unwilling to negotiate. As of Sunday morning, with a fancy new collective bargaining agreement in place according to both sides, Fehr should be viewed as someone who knew what he was doing. 

Hired in September of 2010, Fehr was brought on to do what he did for the MLB players over the course of his time as the head of the MLB Players' Association: Get the best CBA possible while strengthening the union. He did that. It wasn't pretty, but then again it never is with these things. 

When negotiations picked up heavily in early December, only to have them blow up, here’s where the league was on some major issues: Five-year limits for contracts and seven-year limits for teams signing their own players, no compliance buyouts and a $60 million salary cap for the 2013-14 season. 

At that point, the offer appeared to be a take-it-or-leave-it proposal, and that deal seemed pretty doable for the players. Fehr waited and the sides took turns angering one another either through the media or with the players’ threat of dissolving the union and taking the owners to court. All the while, it seemed that both sides were way too blasé about potentially losing the season.  

Many thought that the owners’ offers would only get worse over the course of the negotiations. Fehr called that bluff, and though it cost the league time and everyone (including a lot of arena workers) money, waiting meant a better deal for the players. 

Though the players moved to meet the owners on the length of the CBA (10 years with an opt-out after eight years), here’s how the aforementioned issues look in the new CBA: Seven-year limits on contracts (eight for teams signing their own guys), two compliance buyouts per team before the 2013-14 season and a 2013-14 salary cap of $64.3 million. If that cap sounds familiar, it’s because it was the same number the league had last season. 

Now, this isn’t to say that the players didn’t have to move in the final stages of negotiations – they had wanted eight-year limits for contracts all around and had previously asked for a $67.5 million salary cap – but the owners moved further. You can say that’s because the players were more realistic initially than the owners were and that the owners naturally had to make up more ground because they were asking for too much, the league’s offers over the last month weren’t terrible. The players just waited for them to turn into what they wanted, and they did. 

Fehr obviously has a reputation when it comes to getting players the best deal, but he’s also not afraid of lockouts. Six of the eight labor negotiations with which he’s been involved have had work stoppages, and if he wants to pad those stats he should stay in his current role for another eight years, as the NHL knows lockouts just as well as he does. 

It’s for that reason that Fehr’s work is all the more impressive. This lockout was going to be a black eye for the league no matter what. Not only did the league further sully its reputation by missing as much time as it did, but it got sweated out by Fehr to the point that they made concessions on what were previously considered deal-breakers. Remembers NHL deputy commissioner Bill Daly’s “hill we’ll die on" quote? That was in regard to contracts being no longer than five years (seven for teams retaining players). One CBA with seven-and-eight-year contracts later, Fehr should get a tattoo of that quote on his bicep prior to the next CBA negotiations.

Fehr’s style was maddening to the league. Owners wanted him out of the negotiating room, so much so that his potential presence was among the issues that divided the sides following positive meetings between select players and owners last month. Yet the union never became rattled, trusting their leader in hopes that it would eventually get them both a fair deal and back on the ice. 

The first part of that finally came on Sunday morning, when meetings with Beckenbaugh finally yielded a new CBA and commissioner Gary Bettman – the same one who said some not-so-nice things about Fehr and the NHLPA last month when those talks blew up – stood beside Fehr and said the words everyone wanted to hear. 

"We have reached an agreement on the framework of a new collective bargaining agreement," Bettman told reporters early Sunday morning. "I want to thank Don Fehr. We still have more work to do, but it's good to be at this point."

The players want to thank Donald Fehr, too. You can debate whether it was worth the wait, but there’s no denying that Fehr successfully did the job he was hired to do.