Maybe I'm reading this wrong, but...
Yet at the individual market level, despite the salary cap, the flight of stars -- or the fear of their flight -- from one team to another is a trend with wide-reaching ramifications.
So... "stars," presumably good players, leaving for other teams and teams worrying about not being able to hold on to their good players... is a new trend with implicitly negative consequences?
The article kind of implies this has never happened before. Which is ludicrous. Teams have worried about this for a long, long time. Since the dawn of free agency, if I'm not mistaken.
The most recent was Monday's deal in Dallas with Mike Ribeiro. At 27 he was eligible for free agency on July 1. The Stars made sure that he never hit the market, giving him $25 million over five seasons. That is a doubling of his current salary and continues a trend of teams extending deals to their core players that are both inflationary and long-term. Players are finding out that they don't have to sacrifice dollars to get length. The mere specter of impending free agency is enough to have guys cashing in.
Well, yes. And...?
Instead of having their young future stars become restricted free agents -- and be susceptible to offer sheets from other clubs -- teams are acting hastily.
Again: something that has definitely never happened before.
Wouldn't it have been worse before? When one team-- infamously, the Rangers-- could gobble up all the big-name talent from other teams? I mean, no matter how disproportionate the amount of money players are signed for, you can only sign so many players. Whether you want to spend your big contract on Sidney Crosby for 27 years or Mike Richards for 5 years or Chris Drury for 9,329 years is your prerogative.
No one is giving the law of supply and demand a chance to take effect. If the teams allowed the pool of restricted free agents to swell, the demand would wane. But, by depleting that pool before July 1, demand will increase for those not inked to these high water salaries.
This is the part that most confuses me. It seems like faulty logic. Hell, now that I reread it over and over, it *is* faulty logic.
So say we have 10 pending big-name free agents, and 15 teams. Five individual teams re-sign five individual free agents before those contracts expire, so now there are 5 players and 10 teams come the off-season. The demand still outweighs the supply.
What is being suggested is that we take the 10 FA's and 15 teams, and allow contracts to run out, which... gives us the exact same situation. 5 teams post-facto resign their five players, and the same thing ultimately happens. In fact, this might even result in more inflated contracts because there's the possibility of bidding wars for a player.
It also doesn't take into account that the teams that sign the five players are kind of sitting back now; once you sign a Sidney Crosby, you're not really stalking a Jaromir Jagr mercilessly. I mean, it'd be nice to have, of course, but you won't be devastated and throwing the remainder of your money at him. My point here is: when teams re-sign 'stars' during the regular season, they simultaneously fall out of the major running for them in the off-season. It's not like Team H is going to re-sign their three or four big-name players and then go looking for 5 more. They sit back during the off-season and get maybe one or two more mid-high class guys and then some fillers.
Hockey players aren't beanie babies that can just be steadily manufactured, which is why this doesn't work (though I'm sure the supply-and-demand name-drop made Eliot feel very smart). It doesn't matter the order in which you hand players out to teams; there aren't magically going to be more star players if you do it a different way.
This is particularly true in the Southeast Division, where the Capitals have Alex Ovechkin becoming a restricted free agent at the end of the season. Given what has transpired with Richards and Getzlaf, what is Ovechkin to expect? He reportedly dismissed an offer prior to the holiday season that was in the $7.5 million range to span the next five seasons. What is his incentive to sign before July 1 if the Capitals don't ante up? Someone this summer will certainly float an offer sheet Ovechkin's way, and $10 million was a number reached last summer during the Oilers' pursuit of Thomas Vanek of the Sabres.
Again... teams are more or less in the same boat as each other. If GM X can figure out how to afford a 10m/yr for 5,346,446 yrs contract and build a good team around that player and GM Y can't... well, good for GM X. Again, the difference is that one team can't keep making these huge offers. Like that, the talent spreads.
I don't think the NHL had this version of "spread the wealth" in mind when the CBA was ratified.
The version where one team couldn't sign all the players? Actually, I think that is kind of what they had in mind.
...
If this isn't what Eliot was trying to say, he needs to address the writing skills/convolution problem ASAP. But I've read this a few times now, and can't seem to come up with another way of interpreting it. What's the point here? Is it that stupid?
