I haven't heard this mentioned at all, but what are the chances of another lockout? Is there a good chance or is it gonna be like baseball where it was like "Oh right the CBA expired, as you were, we'll wrap this up in a few days/weeks"
They haven't started negotiating yet. Bettman said after the All Star break. At this conference, he said Fehr was still in a learning curve wrt league issues. [I had to chuckle at that. Fehr is labor economics expert and was with a far bigger league and its issues, inclusive of anti trust exemption, before Bettman ever became a commish. Fehr got MLB on anti competitive practices in spite of their exemption!]
I doubt there's much of a learning curve.
The delay may be a game of chicken. Fehr has very little he can gain for the players, and the NHL wants more back, apparently. I think the league is going to have to propose something to the NHLPA if they want anything changed. The players have done far better than anyone expected, so their side may be happy to wait it out.
The Wings were breaking even with $80 million+ payrolls 10 years ago. I can't even imagine how much money they've been making with $50-60 mil payrolls, even if they haven't raised ticket prices much lately.
I also can't imagine how much money the Leafs and Nucks and Habs must be making. The other Canadian teams have a lot of support as well, but the Leafs and Habs have century-old fanbases and the Nucks have been the best Canadian team for about 15-20 years now.
Something I forgot to mention about the cap going up and the inflationary effect it has on salaries - teams like Florida last summer end up having to dump huge sums of money at mediocre free agents just to get to the cap floor. If Flip is on the open market and you run a team that has to spend 5 or 6 mil to get to the floor, he's as attractive as any of these mid-range guys. He's skilled, he's fast, he's very good defensively, he's got championship experience, he's bright, he's articulate, and he's a good-lookin' dude. You don't get as many points as you'd want from a $5-6 mil player, but for a team that just needs to spend some dough to hit the floor he'd be an ideal guy to waste money on.
The Wings were breaking even with $80 million+ payrolls 10 years ago. I can't even imagine how much money they've been making with $50-60 mil payrolls, even if they haven't raised ticket prices much lately.
I also can't imagine how much money the Leafs and Nucks and Habs must be making. The other Canadian teams have a lot of support as well, but the Leafs and Habs have century-old fanbases and the Nucks have been the best Canadian team for about 15-20 years now.
Something I forgot to mention about the cap going up and the inflationary effect it has on salaries - teams like Florida last summer end up having to dump huge sums of money at mediocre free agents just to get to the cap floor. If Flip is on the open market and you run a team that has to spend 5 or 6 mil to get to the floor, he's as attractive as any of these mid-range guys. He's skilled, he's fast, he's very good defensively, he's got championship experience, he's bright, he's articulate, and he's a good-lookin' dude. You don't get as many points as you'd want from a $5-6 mil player, but for a team that just needs to spend some dough to hit the floor he'd be an ideal guy to waste money on.
Anywhoo, if Tomas Kopecky can get in the $4M range, it's easy to imagine Flip getting $5 to $5.5M
The question will the become, how much do we want to pay Flip to keep him from getting to the market? Would he sign a Kronwall-type deal?
As the cap goes up, teams are sitting with more and more cap room on hand.
But that is largely meaningless with regards to overall market values, because what we're talking about when we look at actual cap value is percentage of contract vs cap as often as raw dollars against the cap.
In other words, just because there is more money and there will likely be overall compensational creep do to a larger piece of the pie, the fact that there is more money does not correlate to their being a greater incidence of stupid contracts.
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Presumably the cap is going up because revenues are going up, so a lot of those teams have the dough as well as the cap room to go after a guy like Filppula on the open market. This would be how a team like Buffalo ends up throwing cash at Leino and Ehrhoff.
They had an ownership change which is an entirely different issue.
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14 teams have more than $14 mil in cap space right now. This inflates the market, particularly on the low and middle-tier guys.
No, it doesn't. The only real inflation you will see is among the elite players, because that is almost always how capped leagues shake out when you look at their salary structure. There may be some small amount of general increase do to a rising cap floor, but that's not exactly the kind of increase one can really notice on a year to year basis.
Year over 5 years? Sure.
Edit: As a quick addition I would like to point you to the cap standings of this year. There are 21 teams who have left at least 2 million dollars in cap space available. There are 14 teams who have at least 4 mil left. There are 11 teams that have at least 8 mil left. There are 7 teams who have at least 12 mil left.
So sure, there may be more overall cap space available, but that's largely meaningless unless those teams actually use the cap space. There's something like 150 mil of unused cap space in the NHL this year. That's the full payroll of two and a half teams, almost.
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Long story short, a lot of that money is going to go somewhere. Last summer it went to guys like Ericsson, Ehrhoff, Wisniewski, Jovo, Upshall, etc. Those guys all got a good bump up from what they really should be making, simply because there was extra money and plenty of cap space floating around out there.
Correlation does not equal causation. The better UFAs in a given year are always going to receive the highest payouts, even in years where that group of UFAs isn't as impressive as previous or subsequent groups of UFAs.
That said, you are again picking out individual cases where extenuating circumstances existed beyond simple market forces in an attempt to explain away things that happen within a market.
E got his deal because there was a scarcity of continuing dmen in Detroit with Lidstrom, Raffy, Stuart, E and Kronwall all either expiring this offseason or next offseason.
Ehrhoff and Wisniewski got typical market value contracts for best available UFAs. I wouldn't have wanted Detroit to pay that amount for either, but that was due to the scarcity of true top tier UFAs on defense last season.
Upshall and Jovo (and Kopecky) got the deals they did because Tallon is a mediocre to poor GM. Given the nature of those tdeals among others on the Florida payroll it is unlikely you will see Tallon spending that big in this UFA period, which is my point. The crappy GMs run out of money eventually.
So, while what you fear with regards to a random GM going over the top on someone the Wings are targeting is certainly something that can happen, it's not an endemic or a built-in feature of a capped market.
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If Flip hits the open market, he'll get some of that "probably too much, but what the hell, why not?" money. Maybe not a ridiculous overpayment, but he'll be able to squeeze an extra mil a year at least - and the possibility of insanity is always there. They can almost certainly lock him up for less than he could find on the open market, but if they wait until after next year and he puts up 70+ points, the price is going to go up.
Enh. I see this argument every time a Wings forward approaches UFA status, and it is wrong way more often than not. People thought Cleary was a 4+ guy when he came up. He wasn't. At the same time people thought Malone was fairly compensated when he got his deal in TB. He wasn't. In one case a bad GM overspent as you fear, and in the other a GM was more rational (although as we've seen, still too high).
So let me ask you a question: even if Fil leaves to go somewhere else... you don't think Detroit could get an equivalent or superior player for that same 5 mil?
Last edited by HockeyinHD: 03-09-2012 at 12:44 PM.
So let me ask you a question: even if Fil leaves to go somewhere else... you don't think Detroit could get an equivalent or superior player for that same 5 mil?
Well that's the $5M question, dude.
Last year, Holland overpaid Ericsson because he didn't want to answer that question.
This year, he got Kronwall signed a really nice deal, I think.
If Flip wants 5 years at 5M a year, would you pay it?
Who would you replace him with? For how much? How likely is that guy to be available?
Well that's the $5M question, dude.
Last year, Holland overpaid Ericsson because he didn't want to answer that question.
Not at all. E got what he got because he didn't want to face a situation where he had to answer that question with E, then with Raffy, then with Lidstrom, and then with Kronwall and then with Stuart.
You cannot ignore the scarcity of solidity on the blue line with regards to expiriation dates, you just can't.
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If Flip wants 5 years at 5M a year, would you pay it?
Oh, good God no. I'd gleefully let him walk out the door. Good bleeping bye.
And I like Fil. I'm just not sold that A) 2011-12 Fil is going to be 2012-13 and onwards Fil or B) that even if it was that's worth 5 mil a year.
I mean, Fil's having a career year and we're talking about a guy who is on 'pace' for 26 goals and 41 assists. When you're talking career years, I'd like it to be a little more careery before going that heavy on a guy.
The nice thing is we're still a year away from having to get serious about this, so it's not as if Holland has to function off of this year as the last possible datapoint.
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Who would you replace him with? For how much? How likely is that guy to be available?
Clue style!
Nyqvist, for 875k, 100%. WITH A CANDLESTICK!
I wouldn't mind that at all.
That said, ideally Nyqvist will replace Hudler next year and Detroit will be able to re-sign Fil at a rational rate and not something absurd like 5 mil.
And that said, check out the UFA class at forward in 2013 and try and tell me it doesn't look great (right now).
