NEW YORK - The NHL season might be over before it ever started.

The league reportedly was set to reject the latest offer by the NHL players' association, which features a 24-percent salary rollback and had led to hope the lockout would end.

The two sides were to meet this afternoon in Toronto for a bargaining session.

But Canadian sports network TSN reported Monday that NHL executive vice president Bill Daly told the 30 team owners the league will turn down the union's offer made last week. TSN cited a memo from Daly to the owners.

"We believe the union's Dec. 9 CBA proposal, while offering necessary and significant short-term financial relief, falls well short of providing the fundamental systemic changes that are required to ensure that overall league economics remain in sync on a going-forward basis," Daly said in Sunday's memo.

Optimism that the offer might soon lead to an end to the 90-day lockout disappeared Monday when the report of the NHL's position came out. If the owners turned down the proposed deal today and presented a counteroffer that included a salary cap, the players' association might quickly break off talks.

If that happens, the NHL would be dangerously close to becoming the first North American sports league to lose an entire season to a labor dispute.

Daly declined comment on the memo to The Associated Press, and wouldn't confirm its existence.

Lou Lamoriello, the New Jersey Devils general manager who is on the NHL's negotiating committee, had no comment other than to say, "I'd rather just let things be and then wait until tomorrow."

Ted Saskin, the NHLPA senior director, wouldn't respond to the TSN report.

"It would not assist the collective bargaining process to comment on excerpts from a leaked league document," Saskin said. "We will comment on the NHL's response to our proposal when it is finally delivered to us."

The NHL hasn't given the players' association an offer since July 21, when it presented six possible concepts to provide a framework for the league's first new collective bargaining agreement in a decade.

All six were formally rejected by the players on Aug. 17, and negotiations that followed over the next month failed to move the sides any closer to resolving philosophical differences.

Talks broke off Sept. 9 when owners turned down an offer, and the lockout was imposed a week later by commissioner Gary Bettman. Players and owners stayed apart from early September until last Thursday.

The league wants cost certainty, a system that will provide a direct link between revenues and player costs. The players' association says that is tantamount to a salary cap and unacceptable.

The union held that position in its offer made a week after it invited owners back to the table. The NHLPA's newest six-year proposal was built on six points, but none provided a connection between income and player salaries.

"If Gary Bettman thinks the only way to do it is his way, that's most unfortunate because I think this is a very creative solution," Saskin said.

Even an immediate rollback of salaries for each year of every existing player contract might not entice Bettman and some hard-line owners to cut a deal without cost certainty.

"If they want to make general managers powerless to set a budget and decide what they want to do, and just have a budget set in New York that is supposed to apply to Toronto, Nashville etc., that's not going to fly with the players," Saskin said. "I know that's not a recipe for a solution."

The players' proposal also contained a luxury tax, a revenue sharing plan, a lower cap on entry-level contracts and bonuses, and an offer to allow teams to take players to arbitration.

Ottawa Senators owner Eugene Melnyk reportedly told Bettman that the salary rollback offered by players wasn't enough to end the lockout.

"It's not a solution," Melnyk, who pulled the Senators out of bankruptcy, told The Ottawa Sun. "It's a one-shot deal that doesn't work."