In 1992, Wayne Gretzky joined the NHLPA li censing agree ment, thus sacrificing incalcu lable money of his own in order to assist every other player in the league.
In 2004, Billy Guerin, a member of the Players’ Association’s negotiating committee, endorsed Bob Goodenow’s hardball tactics even while it cost him $9 million in salary for the canceled season, and considerably more factoring in the union-initiated rollback.
These are just two examples of the way it was when the NHLPA was a functioning organization dedicated to the financial betterment of every player in the union. This is the way it must be if the union is to rebuild itself in the image of those who understood the necessity of sacrifice to attain a common goal.
Which is to say that the current involvement in PA business of Sidney Crosby and Alexander Ovechkin, the two biggest stars in the NHL, is welcome only if they are in it for their brothers and not to reverse the course and meaning of this union’s history by focusing on escrow as their raison d’etre.
We’re told Ovechkin, who beginning next season will have 11 years worth a face value $106 million remaining on his contract with Washington, interrupted a PA conference call last month to declare that his only interest was in reducing or eliminating escrow deductions that conceivably will cost him upward of 15 percent of his annual salary.
Escrow, of course, is the mechanism by which the NHL enforces the percentage-of-the-gross concept on which the entire hard cap CBA is based. If there is no escrow or if there is a cap on escrow as per the NBA, there is no hard cap.
The NHL canceled a season (and appeared willing to cancel a second, though we will never quite know, will we?) only to get its percentage of the gross, so if eliminating escrow from the next CBA is this union’s primary objective, the PA might as well prepare for extinction. Escrow is not going away. Neither is the cap. Scabs will skate on the ice before this escrow system is placed on ice.
The only method by which the union can seek to control escrow is through the five-percent cap escalator the PA has the option of triggering each summer. Increasing the cap by five percent does increase the likelihood of increased escrow deductions, but a higher cap benefits every potential free agent as well as every big-market team and every successful team that wishes to remain intact.
The PA has exercised the escalator every summer since the lockout, though last year’s vote was close, and troubling so, even as then-executive director Paul Kelly campaigned for the increase. The close vote betrayed a lack of understanding of the importance of pushing the cap ceiling and floor to the maximum allowed under the CBA.
Crosby, who has just begun to become a public voice, will have three years at $25.5 million remaining on his contract beginning next season. Large escrow deductions will of course cost him a considerable amount of money, just as they will disproportionately hurt Evgeny Malkin, Mike Richards, Henrik Lundqvist and every marquee athlete on long-term deals.
But, as Crosby, Ovechkin and the league’s elite wage earners should and must understand, nearly 70 percent of the league’s players are eligible to become free agents the next two summers. By our count, 335 players are eligible to be free agents in 2010 with another 190 eligible the following summer. Every one of those players will benefit from a higher cap.
Crosby, Ovechkin and any executive who assumes power in the NHLPA must understand that the one insidious element of the hard cap that never changes is that what is good for one player is necessarily bad for his teammates, and that whatever is good for the individual is bad for the collective.
NHL players always have been ready to sacrifice for their teammates. If Crosby, Ovechkin and the rest of the NHL’s elite wage earners aren’t ready to continue to sacrifice for their fellow union members in the tradition of Gretzky, Guerin and dozens like them who have come before, then the NHLPA is done as a meaningful unit.
If escrow is the prime force at work in this union dysfunction, the NHLPA is finished.
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I’d say Kyle Okposo would look pretty good on the right side with Zach Parise on the left and, say, Ryan Kesler in the middle for Team USA in Vancouver, wouldn’t you?
The Hall of Fame induction speeches delivered by Brian Leetch, Steve Yzerman, Luc Robitaille, Brett Hull, Lou Lamoriello and John Davidson could not have been more gracious, with Lamoriello citing office staff in attendance at the ceremonies serving as the measure of the man who engenders (and reciprocates) intense loyalty from those who know him best.
That Dave Checketts sure likes to be seen and heard in his team’s locker room, doesn’t he?
Finally, the NHL Network will begin to simulcast a late-afternoon show out of Wayne Gretzky’s Restaurant in Toronto. Slap Shots has learned the league will pay rent of $8.2 million.