StormJH1

I don't believe my information (from hockeydb.com) was incorrect. The Brunner vs. Holden stats I cited were from 2009-10, not last season. Yes, he had better numbers than Holden last year (who was then 33), and is a better player. I was simply illustrating that a player like Josh Holden is capable of even better numbers than Brunner had in that league, yet was not good in the NHL. In the current season, Dan Fritsche and Glen Metropolit are also on a point-per-game pace, and the same goes for them. Either way, it doesn't matter, because I think we both agree that Brunner is capable of a 20 G/20 A season in the NHL, at the very least, and if he does that, it would offset the loss of a guy like Hudler at much less of a financial commitment. The truth is that it's not really that hard for fringe AHL'ers to come up and post 20 goals in today's NHL, assuming they get enough minutes to do so. Teams like Edmonton have gotten that production out of bargain basement guys for years. But given that the Wings have stalled out a bit in producing pure goal scorers (both due to low draft position and TRADING away draft picks), AND generally demand their 3rd and 4th liners to bring something on the defensive side of the ice, 20 goals from Brunner would be particularly valuable.

So, with the NHL/NHLPA apparently set to talk today, do we really have any idea what was said in these recent meetings. They seemed to be productive (or at least not counter-productive), and this came on the heels of the 11/1 news that the owners were willing to "chip in" somewhat on the "make whole" provision. Even though the media is slightly pro-players in their coverage, I was surprised how many people gave Bettman the benefit of the doubt on his 10 minute consideration of the three counter-proposals by the NHLPA. I think that Bettman's barely-even-perfunctory review of those offers, coupled with distrust over the 48-hour "owners can talk to players" window really tanked what should have been an ongoing process leading up to 10/25. I never believed that the full season could be saved (or perhaps even the Winter Classic), but it was disgraceful to see that progress completely fall apart due to (IMO) the stubbornness of the Union to make ANY concessions on their proposal.

Haha. Nah, Omark only "coasts" in tie games because if, heaven forbid, he should score the go-ahead goal that would mean he wouldn't get to do his super-awesome shootout moves, you guys! As for Brunner, look, I'm thrilled that he's back with Zug and tearing it up. But let's keep the following in mind: (1) He's been with Zug for 5 years now, so it's not surprising that he's productive the Swiss "A" league. The question is whether his game will translate to an NHL style of play, smaller rinks, etc. (2) Zetterberg and Omark are new additions to that team, and Zetterberg is obviously the type of player who is willing to pass and make his linemates better. It's great that they're developing "chemistry", but the increased quality of teammates (in an overall mediocre-talent league) probably has more to do with the numbers than Brunner himself. (3) One of Brunner's best seasons with Zug was 2009-10, in which he 23 G and 35 A. But there was another player on his team who was better. This player had 30 G and 33 A, and was a former 1st round draft pick of the Vancouver Canucks. That player was Josh Holden, a guy who turned out to be, at best, a fringe 4th liner/AHL'er after several cups of tea in the NHL. That doesn't mean Brunner is automatically garbage, but when I hear "star player in (insert Euro league here)", it means about as much to me as when Mickey used to celebrate every Red Wings 4th liner with "He scored 50 goals in junior one year!"

I am so ANGRY right now. Knew this was coming for weeks, and it just gets worse and worse. The 2012 lockout, for me anyway, is so much worse than the 2004-05 lockout. At least during THAT lockout, I felt like the game had serious problems that needed to be addressed. Also, we didn't know what the loss of a full season would feel like, and there was hope (until January) that it could be saved. This time, I KNOW what a lockout feels like. And this lockout has NO purpose that means anything to a fan. All the people telling me that the owners need a bigger share of the pie so that the 18 teams losing money can be back in the black...shut up. Please shut up. There was nothing in the owners' proposal that would do anything to keep idiot GM's from circumventing their own rules they asked for, and generally doing an awful job running hockey teams in markets that don't even really want hockey. If I hear the phrase "new NHL" one more time, I might have a nervous breakdown. What did we accomplish in exchange for losing an entire year? Take back your stupid salary cap, cap floor, trapezoid, regular season shootouts, and obstruction calls and give me back the old NHL. If you had to completely blow up the system to get what you want, and having gotten what you want (plus $3.3 billion revenues), and you STILL can't figure out how to divide up all the money you collected from the fans?!

It's going to be today, I would think. The tough part of this is as that as much as a win the "trap" 50/50 proposal was for the owners from a P.R. standpoint, somebody with the NHL now has to stand up and explain that they're cancelling this game. While people understand that this is a negotiation and both sides are at fault, there's still the mental association that the league decides its lockout is more important than this extremely popular and ridiculously anticipated event. And it's not just the event, it's like the cancellation of a TV mini-series with the HBO 24/7 angle, as well. This sucks. I've talked to casual sports fans who didn't even know there was a lockout two weeks into the season. I don't think you can even measure the damage of taking this event off of TV on January 1st, just when it was getting to the point where it was an annual event people might have looked for.

Ha, right. The players are the ones with the keys to the car. They're in control. Which is precisely why the league has locked them out from the ability to do their jobs twice in seven years, forcing hundreds of the better ones overseas, while the more average players sit on an absolute loss. First, we need to understand that the idea of a 50/50 split is totally arbitrary. There is no logical reason that hockey related revenues have to be "equally" shared between players and owners, except that it's the type of logic that makes sense to 4-year-olds, or people who barely pay attention to hockey. Real-life businesses don't work like that. Companies and management have the power. Say you are an attorney in a law firm and you bill $300 an hour. At the end of a 1900-hour year, you have generated $570,000 for the firm. Your salary is not $570,000. It may be $100,000, or something in that ballpark, but the revenue has to go to cover costs, pay for staff, benefits plans, etc. The attorney looks at that and says "Not fair! I'm only taking home 18% of what I generate for the firm!" But of course it isn't that simple. Attorneys are very replaceable. There are thousands of law school graduates every year, and lateral hires available from other firms and other markets. But NHL-caliber hockey players are much more rare, and the differences between the really good ones and the really average ones are much more noticeable. Moreover, if you staffed most teams with all the same facilities and resources, but ONLY average players, demand for your product would dry up very quickly. The 2005 CBA was a unequivocal win for the owners at that time, which became a net win for the players in the coming years due to the growth of the game and the owners own stupidity. The owners found every way possible to spend additional money beyond the CBA constraints they themselves negotiated to put in place. They circumvented the cap, buried NHL-level salaries in the minors, and paid out huge bonuses to front load deals well beyond the what the CBA appears to allow. And yet, teams like Minnesota, Detroit, Toronto, Pittsburgh, etc. can afford to do this and still operate. Teams like Nashville and Phoenix cannot. The solution to this problem has nothing to do with what percentage of HRR the players take. Increasing the owners' share is just throwing good money after bad. The root cause of the problem is in the lack of revenue sharing to benefit the overall health of the league. That's an owner vs. owner issue, but since all the owners can seem to agree on is taking more money from the players, that's all we ever debate.

I feel most bad for some of the Wings (and Leafs) fans from outside Detroit that very possibly booked plane tickets or made other travel/work plans that are now all screwed up by this. Is the league going to refund $300 plane tickets along with the admission tickets? Don't think so. I had to start thinking about whether or not I was going to attend this thing back in March/April. I honestly didn't even the lockout in the back of my mind. Ultimately decided against it because I already am home for a week around Christmas time, and to stretch the whole trip out to about 10 to 14 days was too much of a burden financially and on missing work. But at least I had 4 episodes of 24/7 and a beautiful game on HD, I thought...

I wasn't as hard on Holland as most were this summer, and had we known for sure then that we'd be at Halloween with no hockey and no end to the lockout in sight, I think more even more people would've supported Holland's "conservatism" (for lack of a better term). But that article is terribly flawed! A pure "points per game" and "dollars per point" (which they actually screwed up and got backwards in their table) comparison? Suter and Colaiacovo are defenseman - are points their ONLY contribution to a hockey team?! Brunner's numbers were from outside the NHL. I think they hired Malcolm Gladwell to do the statistical analysis in that thing... People need to let this go. Parise and Suter WERE significantly better players than any of the guys we picked up. They WOULD have made the Wings significantly better than they are now. But... (1) It was out of our control!!! I don't know what people wanted the Wings to do...throw ANOTHER $20 million at each player? It wasn't a money decision at all. When Michigan-born players like Rafalski or Modano decided to put on the Winged Wheel, everyone collectively said "Hmm, yeah! Makes sense!". When Parise and Suter did the same thing up in this area, people are somehow appalled. (2) We don't even know how this is all going to play out. Two weeks ago, it looked like we were going to start hockey up with a $59 million cap (or a cap that would get there in short time). If I'm the Wild and I already have depth problems on my lower lines and defensive corps...AND I need to shed about $10 million in salary...ruh roh. And it's not like we lost any of the players we lost through negligence either! Lidstrom retired because he's 40! Not because Kenny didn't sweet talk him. Stuart left because he missed his family. I suppose Illitch could have sold the team to L.A., but that'd be kinda like throwing the baby out with the bath water, don't you think? And I'm not losing sleep about losing Hudler or Holmstrom because it was time for both of those to happen.

This. I was so infuriated by Bill Daly's statement this morning suggesting that there was "nothing to discuss". The NHLPA presented 3 counter-proposals, and they were rejected within the course of an hour. I took the NHLPA about 2 days to put those together, which is really quite remarkable considering the size of the union and the fact that the NHL has been dictating the terms of this debate and creating artificial timelines. If the owners' position is that there's nothing to discuss unless the player's accept our exact proposal, that is NOT "negotiating". I can already sense fans starting to turn on the players a bit, and I really wish they would put this into some perspective. You can't simply say "Oh, these guys are all millionaires that get to play a game for a living, just give a little money back". Aside from the fact that most players are "thousand-aires", not millionaires, and may only get a few years a professional contract before they have to retire (or get hurt), it's easy for FANS to give back the players money that they've earned. Heck, fans would love the product just as much if Crosby made $200,000 a year, and the entry level salary was $25,000. But I'm sorry, that's just not realistic for the scope of this business and how much money these players (which ARE the "product") generate. This is a cash grab by the owners, who basically were caught betting against the future success of their own league when they agreed to the 57/43 split. The contracts already signed were limited once by the rules of the 2005 CBA (salary cap and other provisions), and are now being asked to be reduced AGAIN by the terms of a new CBA that didn't exist at the time the deals were signed. And, oh by the way, all of this is against the backdrop of a league that has made absurd amounts of money over that same period of time. A lockout is much harder on players than it is on owners. I find it comical that fans actually believe these players want to be wearing suits instead of playing the sport they dedicated their lives to AND earning lucrative contracts for so doing.

Did I miss something here? http://octopusthrower.com/2012/10/20/kronwall-strong-candidate-for-vacant-wings-captaincy/ I don't live in the Detroit area and haven't given too much though to actual HOCKEY with all of the lockout crap going on, but wasn't it basically a foregone conclusion that Zetterberg was the next captain? (Then again, people once said that Marty Lapointe was going to be the next captain of the Red Wings too). Is this just one idiot blogger speculating wildly, or is there any truth to this?

Yeah, I voted for Datsyuk, but I absolutely hate the question in the poll. I don't know what a "pure" goal scorer means. I think that people hear that and think of a super-talented player who is singularly focused on putting points on the board. Marian Gaborik is a "pure goal scorer". So is Ovechkin. Pavel Bure and Ziggy Palffy from back in the day. The Red Wings don't really employ guys like that, or at least they haven't recently. If you took Datsyuk's innate ability and gave him the "personality" of Ovechkin, I feel like he scores 45 goals a year, but I can't "know" that. And he'd probably be a less valuable player to his team, whether people want to believe that or not. Again, though, I was really surprised by how much of a two-way game Hossa actually had when he played for us. Yeah, he was a terrific goal scorer that carried the Wings at times during the 08-09 regular season, but he's also a very large, strong individual who would back check and put a body on you in the corner. Nothing irks me more about (some) Wings fans that the revisionist history applied to Hossa's one year with this team. But that's a topic for a different thread.

I'm not sure I even like the tone of that guy's article, let alone the aimless speculation. His whole point was that naming Kronwall would send a "message" to the organization of fans - basically by picking a "tough guy" as a captain, we'd be adopting a "tougher" mentality. Is he saying the Wings stagnated because we had a captain like Lidstrom (who, by the way, won us a Cup and barely missed time despite almost losing a certain body part in '09...yeah, real pansy). I have always heard/thought/expected it would be Z. Datsyuk's the better player, but that's not what a captain is. That'd be like saying Fedorov should have been captain because he skates faster than Steve Yzerman.

Great post, though I'm not entirely clear why a league that generated this much revenue in the past 7 years couldn't have some workable form of revenue sharing. The NFL does, and it's not like Dallas and Jacksonville are even in the same arena in terms of the money they bring into the league. But your other points are all well taken. I've had people telling me that the players should cave in some more because "the teams in bad markets are still struggling". Well, great, but the lockout does nothing to solve that problem. There's no new revolutionary money-sharing arrangement that come out of it - the owners as a whole are just trying to grab as much as they can. I've never seen much evidence that Bettman and the well-to-do owners want real parity in this league. I find it ironic that the Stanley Cup matchup in 2004 was Calgary and Tampa Bay, but the Cup winners from the past several years in the "new NHL" have been LA, Boston, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Detroit. All of them either large markets, or at least solid hockey markets with ownership that can easily spend up to the cap and beyond. (Well, the LA Kings are a more complex story, but they've definitely had money to spend in the past few years, and the ability to acquire expensive contracts from other teams). Can anyone honestly say that the players have done more to unreasonably drive up costs in this league than the OWNERS since 2005? I think everyone knows and expects that Crosby and Ovechkin are going to want gigantic 10-year deals, or that marginal players like Ville Leino and Scott Gomez are going to ask for $30 and $50 million deals that they never deserved. Somebody has to agree to PAY these stupid deals, or it doesn't happen. Heck, baseball doesn't even have a salary cap, and yet you see free agents like Jermaine Dye sit on the free agent market because they think they're worth multi-million dollar deals, and 30 MLB teams wisely disagree. Then you look at what teams like Chicago, Philadelphia, and Minnesota have done to take advantage of their healthy financial situation, and pay out MASSIVE long-term deals that are completely antithetical to the spirit of the CBA. And if Minnesota hadn't done it, Detroit, Pittsburgh, New York, or any number of other "have" teams would have. And then Buffalo or the Islanders goes out and overpays some run-of-the-mill veteran way too much money, either because they need to keep up or, even worse, because they have to overpay some guys to even get to the salary cap floor. Yeah, I want an 82-game season, but if we leave all this crap unfixed and have continued labor unrest through the next CBA, how is this game going to fix any of the serious problems facing it in the coming years? EVERY other issue gets swallowed up by the money debate, even ones that everyone would benefit from, like realignment and player safety.

Here's the truly sad part of this (and the fans are guilty of it as well): I've been moderately anti-NHL (and pro-NHLPA) for this whole thing, and despite the NHL's brilliantly evil PR tactic of placing an arbitrary negotiating deadline on the PLAYERS to acquiesce to the demands of the owners and end a lockout that the OWNERS created, I'm not losing sight of how this entire dispute started, and how ridiculous it is. Even if no deal gets done before 10/25, and there's no 82-game season. Most people assumed that was a foregone conclusion once we started losing preseason games anyway. But while I still largely agree with the players, and view the lockout as unnecessary, I'm getting the sense from the NHLPA that "honoring current contracts" is an issue taking precedence over all. And that's terribly short-sighted. There are MANY other significant issues that severely compromised the fairness of the game and the safety of the players from 2005 to 2012, but the fans heard "82-game season" and "50/50" and suddenly all they care about is "Accept! Accept! Accept!". There's some good elements in the NHL's proposal. I like the 5-year deals, and the third-party arbitrator for discipline decisions is probably a good thing. But the $12 million drop in salary cap will cripple some franchises, and the provisions retroactively punishing teams for signing mega-deals are barbaric and certain to cause horrible unintended consequences. If you would've asked anyone in 2011: "What are the major issues affecting the long-term viability of this game?", here are a handful that come immediately to mind: The safety of the players, caused in large part by the 04/05 rule changes and the increased speed of the game Circumvention of the salary cap, including the new "Minnesota Wild" tactic of offering absurd signing bonuses to pay players nearly double what the CBA supposedly allows in one year "Revenue sharing", or the complete lack thereof Proper scheduling/realignment (such as the plan proposed last year and rejected by the NHLPA as a bargaining chip) Notice that none of those were "what percentage of hockey related revenues go to the players and owners", though that issue is obviously tied to players salaries and the bottom line of the 30 teams. If you fixed those four things (and I think all four of them COULD be significantly improved), we'd have a much better game and a more viable business model going forward. If you leave those issues untouched, rush into an agreement arguing primarily over grandfathered contracts, AND expand the league to 32 teams (as is heavily rumored today), we're going to be right back here again in 7 years or so. And in the meantime, we'll see even more BS like what Chicago and Philadelphia did to become Cup contenders, plus a whole assortment of NEW problems. I want hockey back worse than anyone, but if we're going to have a lockout that the NHL tells me we sorely need, then I want to see some evidence that there was a purpose to that lockout other than playing with revenue numbers. Say what you want about the 2004-05 Lockout, but we did emerge with a notably different (and, in many ways, better product) after that horrible experience.

I really struggle with this. I live in Minnesota, and even here, I talk to some casual sports fans and they don't even know about the lockout going on. The REAL hockey fans are already suffering. We're suffering right now. I don't want sign some pledge or get up on a soapbox about buying NHL merchandise or tickets to further punish myself (one of the select few that actually cares) AFTER the lockout is over. I don't buy Lidstrom or Datsyuk jerseys, watch NHL games on TV, or eat Little Caesar's Pizza because I'm "supporting the league" or even because I want to put more money in Mike Illitch's pocket. I do it because I ENJOY those things. I'm sorry, but as much of a power trip as Bettman and Fehr might be on, they don't own this game. And when people try to make me feel guilty for loving the game of hockey because of a bunch of lawyers in a boardroom, I'm sorry, but that's seriously screwed up. You're GIVING ownership of the game to people who don't deserve it when you do that.

Our brand new, incredibly overpriced 4th-liner-soon-to-be-healthy-scratch retweeted this yesterday: http://twitter.com/A...8417152/photo/1 The caption was "Inuit Rights!", preceded by a retweet about the US placing endangered status on polar bears hurting the Inuit nation. Whatever, man. I might be labeled a "hippie" because I don't want pictures of dead polar bears popping on my Twitter feed, but I'm unfollowing. I understand this is a complicated issue (not unlike the delicate relationship Americans have with Native Americans), and that a polar bear is probably the biggest thing you can shoot and eat when you live on a block of ice. http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/wleonard/government-sponsored_polar_bea.html That doesn't mean I have to like it. I've also yet to hear a cogent explanation as to why a team with too many forwards (but not enough defense, at the time) needed a 3-year deal with a cap hit of $1.9 million per for a "poor man's Cal Clutterbuck" with a substance abuse history, a reputation for taking dumb minors, and his place as one of the more disliked opposing players by Wings fans, and not for good reasons. And he wishes we could kill more polar bears. Awesome. Well, I guess if the lockout lasts 3 years, there would be at least one positive side effect to come out of that. (Too harsh?)

This ties into my post above. Comparing eras is difficult and unfair in a lot of ways, but both Wayne and Gordie were DOMINANT players relative to what everyone else did at their time. True, Gordie played largely before slapshots and with goalies who basically had to give up if you shot at a low corner, but to survive physically in that era and put up decades of star production is a truly amazing feat. Just because the "skill" level of the players in the 80's was clearly better than the 60's or 70's doesn't necessarily mean it was harder for Wayne to score in that era. The entire game was offense-oriented. Not to sound like Malcolm Gladwell, but Wayne Gretzky came into the league at the exact perfect time to put up a 20-year career with massive point totals. And, by the way, so did Yzerman - he just wasn't as gifted of a player as Gretzky was.

There are other reasons. People tend to forget (or didn't witness it firsthand if they are under, say, 30 years old) that NHL scoring fell off a cliff after roughly the 1992-93 season. http://www.quanthockey.com/TS/TS_GoalsPerGame.php If you only talk with Red Wings fans, you grow up with the impression that the 90's and early 2000's were this golden age of hockey. And they were...for a Red Wings or Avalanche fan. Everyone else refers to it as the "Dead Puck" era - the first time in this history of hockey were goaltenders were absolutely fearless in net, when they wore absurdly large (and since outlawed) jerseys, pads, and chest protectors that took up the whole net, but still benefited from trapping defensive schemes, no two-line passes, and unmitigated obstruction that slowed the game down. There's a reason Teemu Selanne scored 70 goals as a rookie and never got close to that total again. If Gretzky's career started in 1991 instead of 1979, he'd still have been a great player, but I'm almost certain he doesn't break Howe's goal record. It wasn't even the same game in the 1980's, and blocked shots are a huge difference even between the 90's and 2000's. I want to say Lidstrom in the poll (who won an extra Cup, and did so as the leader of a Salary Cap-limited team), but my heart knows that it's Yzerman. However, I do think that the praise for Yzerman swings a little too far at times, and people forget that that those 80's Wings teams where Yzerman was an offensive beast were still basically the likable losers. It wasn't until Fedorov and Lidstrom came along that this became a perennial playoff team, Bowman got the star players to play defense, and even then, they still couldn't beat the other great teams of the day ('95 Devils, '96 Avs) until they added Shanahan and some other "spare parts". But if you look at Yzerman's first half of his career compared to Lidstrom's, he was a much more important player to his team, even if the team wasn't doing much at the time. Lidstrom may well be among the Top 5 or Top 10 defensemen of all time, yet Yzerman's importance to the Red Wings is somehow much more complex than that.

On the issue of whether or not "bad PR" hurts the owners (or the players), I keep thinking back to Steve Young's rant on the NFL ref lockout (before it was completely superseded by the MNF Green Bay/Seattle fiasco). Young said that the league had the upper hand because the demand for the product was "inelastic". Even though the league caved after the extreme embarrassment caused by the replacement refs, I'm not sure he was wrong. The league could have maintained course, and I don't think people would have stopped consuming the product. Gamblers might have laid off, but that's a whole different can of worms. The point is, people can kick and scream an awful lot...and still reach for their wallets simultaneously. The perception has always been that the NHL has a much more fragile fanbase, but I don't think that's true. I think it's a smaller fanbase. I think it's a niche sport that doesn't translate well to network television ratings. But there was little evidence following the 04/05 lockout to suggest to Bettman that the fans won't be back...after two weeks, a year, or multiple years. I'll be back. Anybody who posts on a hockey board and honestly tells me they won't watch it or spend money on it after being DEPRIVED of it is basically lying to you. So if you're the players, what are the "PR risks" to them? An NHL player is an individual who receives a salary. He needs the league more badly than the league needs him. But he's also a very small part of the collective that is the NHLPA. The players were fairly unpopular during the 2004 lockout (compared to now), but that unpopularity didn't attach to any individual players, unless it was a Jeremy Roenick situation where they said something stupid or offensive. Nobody blamed the lockout on, say, Steve Yzerman. So if it's a question between the players "saving face" with the fans or getting a better deal, I would think a players association led by Donald Fehr will tend towards the latter. My buddy stunned me today when we were arguing about the lockout - he compared the NHL players going overseas to "scab employees" in a labor strike. That's absurd. Not only does confuse a "lockout" with a "strike", 388 NHL players played in 19 European leagues during the '04 lockout.

Wow, there's just so much to consider here. Forget the whole aspect of much money the players are getting, I don't think I'm cool with rushing into any deal just to meet a rigid deadline, at the expense of thinking about the consequences. I mean, in 2005, nobody was talking about long-term, front-loaded deals that would circumvent the cap. Everyone was fixated on the miniscule $39 million cap, and the assumption was that long-term deals of any kind would be too risky. But Chicago basically won Cup by exploiting the hell out of that one strategy. Philadelphia built a Cup contender out of it. Teams were able to retain star players like Luongo, Parise, Suter, and Zetterberg that otherwise could have tested the market for considerably more money. Now we have stuff like THIS just thrown into the new proposal? http://www.broadstre...s-paul-holmgren What if players retire early due to injury? Do the Pens have 5-10 years with a Crosby-sized $8.7 million barricade in their salary cap if he gets one too many concussions? Also, I don't like the whole idea of players on other teams sending unexpected GIGANTIC cap hits to the team that originally signed them, simply by deciding to retire on a whim. What a mess. It hurts certain owners too. It could have unpredictably devastating effects on the franchises that were viable enough to sign these deals in first place. And it retroactively punishes franchise who played within the rules (though arguably outside the "spirit" of those rules) with no forseeability that this type of consequence could ever come down on them. The Wings are one of the offenders for this type of thing, but not even close to biggest offender. And since when did those owners care about lowering the cap? I can only read the owner's motivations by their actions - stashing Cristobal Huet and Wade Redden in the minors while paying out overall salary budgets far in excess of the actual cap hardly suggests to me that owners want to spend less. Neither do front-loaded deals or the (relatively new) trick of using signing bonuses to pay out $25 million/year deals when the CBA says that a player can only take home around $14 million a year. Why can't the "Cap Hit" simply be calculated more accurately, say, a reflection of what that player is actually earning. Eliminate gigantic bonuses, or make them count against the cap. If Parise makes $14 million in year one of his deal, then he should have a cap hit reflecting the gigantic payday he gets THIS year. And if you're worried about this sort of thing: (alternating deals up and down to keep the totals even) Parise $14M $2M $14M $2M Suter $2M $14M $2M $14M ...then do something like the NBA where you have a max deal, and there are limitations on how that deal can be structured. The NHL's CBA & Cap Structure is like the "Wild West"...it's a salary cap in name and appearance, but when you break down the rules, it basically does nothing to stop top level spending by clubs who have the resources to buy better players.

http://blogs.thescor...ld-get-creamed/ Under the NHL proposal, if you sign a player to a huge multi-year deal and they retire, you keep the cap hit (but don't pay their salary) for the duration of the contract. This is even the case if the contract is traded to another team - the original signing team has the cap hit after the player retires. I don't understand why the NHL put this clause into the proposal THEY came up with. It clearly harms teams that have already signed long-year deals, extending into the age 35+ years of their career. But if there's a 5-year cap on new deals anyway, what does this really do beyond retroactively punishing deals already signed? It isn't a carrot for the players in any way I can see, and (some) owner are going to absolutely hate it. So why is it there?

Part of me wants to still believe that PR matters because we're supposed to be the "customers" here, but you're probably right. Was just arguing with a friend (huge Wild fan) over this. He thinks the NHLPA caves and takes this offer (or one very similar to it) in the next few days. If he's right and I'm wrong, we play hockey. But I'd just don't see it. Fehr wasn't hired to cave into the first offer, he was hired specifically because the players felt they got played in 2005.

This. Very well stated. Even if you hate Bettman, you have to admire his sheer evil genius. The NHL owners LOCKED out the players and had public sentiment against them, and now have completely flipped the table to the point where the NHLPA has a deadline of less than two weeks to reach a deal with them, or will be perceived as "overreaching" in negotiations. I think the problem the Players' Association has is that the average fan didn't know that they had a 57% share to begin with, or doesn't really understand how that is calculated. (And by the way, neither do I). So when you hear that they had a percentage higher than 50%, and the owners are now offering 50% (even if it isn't really half of the money), that sounds reasonable. Without injecting politics into this, Bettman negotiated like a Republican - they established an extreme position as a starting point, so much so that their "concession" of 50% would still be a big win for the owners. I'm hearing little stuff that might be beneficial to the players (3rd party arbitrator reviews of discipline), but by and large, all of the money and contract related issues swing dramatically in favor of the owners, so why would the NHLPA cave?

That's consistent with what I read from reporters on Twitter. Basically they get the same deal the first two years, but then the overall deal is reduced from years 3 and beyond. Wouldn't that just be a "deferred rollback" as opposed to an "immediate rollback"?

I'm trying to read through portions of it now, it's a lot to digest. There are some really interesting provisions regarding what happens if these mega-deals are moved around. You can trade a Parise or Suter, for example, but if they retire, the cap hit still applies to the original team (Wild) that signed the deal. Players’ Share “Make Whole” Provision: The League proposes to make Players “whole” for the absolute reduction in Players’ Share dollars (when compared to 2011-12) that is attributable to the economic terms of the new CBA (the “Share Reduction”). Using an assumed year-over-year growth rate of five percent for League-wide revenues, the new CBA could result in shortfalls from the current level of Players’ Share dollars ($1.883 Billion in 2011-12) of up to $149 million in Year 1 and up to $62 million in Year 2, for which Players will be “made whole.” (By Year 3 of the new CBA, Players’ Share dollars should exceed the current level ($1.883 Billion for 2011-12) and no “make whole” will be required.) Any such “shortfalls” in Years 1 and 2 of the new CBA will be computed as a percentage reduction off of the Player’s stated contractual compensation, and will be repaid to the Player as a Deferred Compensation benefit spread over the remaining future years of the Player’s SPC (or if he has no remaining years, in the year following the expiration of his SPC). Player reimbursement for the Share Reduction will be accrued and paid for by the League, and will be chargeable against Players’ Share amounts in future years as Preliminary Benefits. The objective would be to honor all existing SPCs by restoring their “value” on the basis of the now existing level of Players’ Share dollars. I'm struggling to decipher exactly what this means. Essentially, it says that there will be "shortfalls" in the overall players' share for the first two years of the CBA. They do a calculation to determine how much was lost and then it is paid back to the player as "deferred compensation" by the league over the remaining years of the contract. But the final sentence seems to suggest that there will be a new "value" of that player's contract based on the new level of money available to the players, which could mean a net reduction. Anyone else?