Re: Who Believes There Will Be NO NHL Come October?
posted at 7/25/2012 12:21 AM EDT
In Response to
Re: Who Believes There Will Be NO NHL Come October?:
In Response to Re: Who Believes There Will Be NO NHL Come October? : I keep reading this, and, while I understand the pull of optics, that's all this is. The current deal commits owners to spending at least $54M in player salaries every year. How they get there is for their GMs to decide. Once you hit $54M, you have $16M to allocate before you hit the ceiling. That variance is currently 33% of what they MUST pay or 3/4 of the most you can pay under the cap. In poker terms, it's a small raise when you've already paid twice that much into the pot, and in this case the payoff is a chance to make gate during the playoffs. If a team makes $3M per home game, and pays 0 player salary, they only need to win one round to have a shot at covering the difference between the floor and the ceiling. That means a commitment to winning is investing to make money rather than pay a few grinders to sit on their hands and lose in front of a half-full arena. We've also seen how the growth in revenues has made the annual cost of long term deals look smaller and smaller as time goes by - so a long term deal fixes the cost of a valuable asset against a growing base of revenue, which means the burder of that cost effectively declines over the course of the deal. Take the first of these deals as an example. Rick DiPietro's 15 year monster deal pays $4.5M per year. When he signed it in 2006-07, that was more than 10% of the team salary cap ($44M/year). Six years later, it's 6.4%. If revenues had continued to grow at the same rate under the same CBA, by the end of the deal, DiPietro would have been 4% of the Cap ($110M). Overall, long term deals look huge, but they're a way of minimizing annual costs for your key players - especially vs. competing for them on the open market. Look at who gives these monster deals - the Devils are always looking for a way to save a buck; the Isles are perpetually broke; Washington has deep pockets, but they're tying up one of the top players in the game and handcuffing Backstrom to him; Minny is a smaller market that has never been a big salary player; the Wirtzes are as bad as Jacobs in Chicago. These are teams that need to find an edge because they will lose UFAs to the next group - the only teams really tossing the cash around like drunks. Rangers are responsible for Gomez, adding Nash, signing Richards as a UFA; the Wings locked up Zetterberg, Datsyuk and Franzen, and, worst of all, the Fillies locked up their own guys in Richards and Carter before dealing them, signed Briere and Bryzgalov, and now Weber, and both Pronger and Timmonen got long terms for guys their age (7 and 6 years). 7 players, 68 years.
Posted by Bookboy007
How they get there is for their GMs to decide.
If I own a business I sure as hell am not going to let one of my employees work entirely autonomously.
I just finished Phil Esposito's book and he said that ownership drove him completely nuts by interfering with trades and insisting he limit team salary - even tho the Lightning were had the lowest salary in the NHL at the time.
He complained of similar interference when with the Rangers.
He was trying to get Gretzky when he was going to get traded from Edmonton, but the powers that be from the Rangers said their sales were good enough without Wayne and wouldn't approve the deal.
