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On July 22, three years will have elapsed since the NHL and the National Hockey League Players' Association ratified a collective agreement to end the exhausting 310-day lockout that cancelled the 2004-05 season.
During the shutdown, NHL commissioner Gary Bettman's favourite buzzwords were "cost certainty." While Bettman would never publicly condone the money that several clubs tossed at players this past week, the NHL office can't be happy about the more than $725-million (all currency U.S.) that clubs spent in the past nine days to re-up some of their own players and lure new talent.
More than a few folks in the hockey world asked why a lockout was necessary, given the number of big-money deals that have been done since NHL free agency kicked in on July 1.
"It's not the league's role to critique individual player signings, or how a club chooses to allocate payroll dollars among players," NHL deputy commissioner Bill Daly said. "Those are individual decisions made by club management.
Related Information
- Anaheim Ducks
- Columbus Blue Jackets
- Detroit Red Wings
- Edmonton Oilers
- Los Angeles Kings
- Tampa Bay Lightning
- Ryan Malone
- Rick Nash
- Dustin Penner
"But the amount of money spent this week itself does not cause concern and it should not send a mixed message. What it says is that the NHL's business is a lot bigger today than it was five years ago, roughly to the tune of almost $600-million bigger. The lockout was never about lowering player salaries per se, it was about making sure that what our clubs pay our players bears a reasonable relationship to the revenues the sport generates.
"In 2004, that was not the case. Today, it is."
This is the fourth off-season since the lockout ended, and the salary cap has risen from $39-million to $44-million to $50.3-million to $56.7-million for the coming season. Teams like the Los Angeles Kings are scrambling to reach the $40.7-million minimum.
There are a few ways to digest the fact that the combined team salaries have already exceeded the combined team salaries when NHL owners locked out their players.
First, if the Detroit Red Wings had the highest payroll at the 2004 trade deadline at $82.9-million, there would likely be a team or two or more that would have surpassed the $100-million mark by now.
Second, although the players and others still suspect that the league's financial affairs were never as bad as the NHL claimed before the lockout, the league and the players now have a hockey-related revenue formula to keep the players' salaries in balance with league-wide revenues.
Third, the value of the second contract for players has increased dramatically because teams are afraid of losing their young talent to unrestricted free agency earlier than ever. This is the first summer that 27-year-olds were eligible for free agency.
Last week, Anaheim Ducks general manager Brian Burke pointed the finger at Edmonton Oilers GM Kevin Lowe for signing Dustin Penner to a five-year, $21.25-million offer sheet last summer.
But as Lowe later pointed out, the Columbus Blue Jackets gave Rick Nash a five-year deal only two weeks after the lockout ended, in which he was paid $7-million in the final year of his pact. That final year would have been his first year of eligibility for unrestricted free agency.
"If [Burke] wants to debate what our offer sheet did to them or to the salaries, any time," Lowe told an Edmonton radio station. "The reality is, Rick Nash's contract a number of years ago, [Patrice] Bergeron's and [Ilya] Kovalchuk's, that sets the standard. That's been going on for decades."
Bergeron averages $4.75-million a year, Kovalchuk $6.4-million a year.
Finally, salaries went way up this month because the free-agent pool was shallow. There were a few high-end players, but because teams like the Tampa Bay Lightning and their new owners wanted to make a splash, players like Ryan Malone become overpriced.
So the ensuing spending spree results in analysts and hockey fans scratching their heads.
