Gotta love that Brian Burke. Just when you think the war of words between the Anaheim Ducks general manager and his Edmonton Oilers counterpart, Kevin Lowe, is dying down, Burke re-ignites the controversy by blaming the rise in player salaries among the NHL's youngest players on Lowe. In an interview published by the Los Angeles Times, Burke said: “You go right now from entry-level to what used to be the third contract, thanks to two offer sheets from Kevin Lowe. Most managers don't' like starting fights with any other managers. Thanks to the Edmonton Oilers, the second contract has disappeared.”
Burke continued: “They're all being re-signed at inflated prices. Everything I said a year ago has come true. Every single word.”
Well, yes and no. Sometimes, you need to probe a little deeper when Burke goes off on a rant. First of all, Lowe wasn't the first general manager to reward a player coming out of the entry-level system with a generous, long-term contract extension. Doug MacLean, then with the Columbus Blue Jackets, did the same for Rick Nash back in the summer of 2005. As the NHL was coming out of the lockout, MacLean gave Nash, then just 21, a five-year, $27-million contract extension that, in the era of the $39 million salary cap, seemed an outrageously generous deal to many of his contemporaries, who grumbled long and loudly about it. The Blues Jackets back-loaded the contract, which came in at a cap figure of $5.4 million, so that Nash will receive $6.5 million and $7 million in the two years remaining on the deal, at which point he will become a free agent at 26. At the time, the contract caused a stir among GMs for the exact reasons Burke implied above - Nash had no arbitration rights coming out his first contract, so why give him so much money when you don't have to. It was widely believed that the Blue Jackets could have gotten Nash for a lot less – and that when one 21-year-old cashed in at that level, others would want to do the same. MacLean justified the deal at the time by calling Nash the “best young player in the world” and in hindsight, it probably wasn't a bad contract, given how the salary cap has jumped and how the new system evolved. And the reason for giving him $7 million in Year 5 of the contract was to buy out Nash's first year of eligibility for unrestricted free agency, for which they had to pay a premium.
Remember, the most controversial concession the owners ceded to the players coming out of the lockout was dropping the age of free agency from 31 to 25. That CBA clause, more than anything Lowe did by trying to poach Thomas Vanek or Dustin Penner as restricted free agents, was the primary reason why young players are getting so much money right now.
If a team wanted to play hardball with its kids, it still has the right to do so. Nothing has fundamentally changed on that front. A team can still tender a qualifying offer to any young player coming out of his first contract and if the team doesn't want to negotiate beyond that, the player's option is take-it-or-leave it.
But – and this is the big but - every manager has to weigh the consequences of negotiating hard on the second contract against the real possibility that if they do so, the player will almost certainly exit – stage right – as soon as he is contractually allowed to do so. So that's the primary reason why Mike Richards received a 15-year commitment from Philadelphia and Alex Ovechkin got 12 years from Washington. Teams are scared to death that they'll invest time, effort and draft choices in these young players and then lose them for nothing at the ripe old age of 25. That's not Lowe's fault. That's the way the CBA was written – and the owners signed off on it, with their eyes wide open. The reality is, under the current CBA, players get just a shade over 56 per cent of hockey-related revenues (HRR); how they divide that number amongst themselves is their own problem, not Kevin Lowe's.
