SO WE’RE to believe the NHL conducted an investigation of the Red Wings’ 12-year, $73 million contract with Henrik Zetterberg — under which the winger is due to receive $71 million in the first 10 years and $2 million over the final two seasons — and found no evidence of skullduggery in the negotiations, but is now concerned with Marian Hossa’s similarly structured front-loaded deal with the Blackhawks and Chris Pronger’s pact with the Flyers?
As if the authorities expect Zetterberg to play for $1 million in 2018-2019 and 2019-2020 at the ages of 38 and 39 while the Red Wings are hit with an annual $6.083 million cap charge, but have questions whether Hossa and Pronger actually will be toiling for minimum wage in their senior years.
Who conducted this initial investigation of the Red Wings, Omar Minaya? HR? And what smoking gun does the NHL believe it will find as it delves into talks the Blackhawks and Flyers had with their respective acquisitions, a memo signed by Peter Ueberroth?
Let’s be clear. Front-loaded contracts such as these are permissible under the Collective Bargaining Agreement. They exist as a tool for big-market, high-revenue teams to lock up players, even if unintended by the framers, just as the use of waivers exists as a tool for high-revenue teams to delete contracts from the cap.
If the NHL doesn’t like it, the league has the next round of collective bargaining to try to do something about it, which, of course, Gary Bettman and the Board will most certainly do.
Not only will the owners come with a term limit expected to be six years, but the league can propose instituting a retroactive limit on contracts, say, negating every existing deal after eight years, just the way every existing contract’s value was discounted by 24 percent last time around.
Interestingly, while dramatically front-loaded contracts benefit the individual players signing them, they are detrimental to the Players’ Association as a whole because they enlarge total actual payroll, chew up the players’ collective percentage of the gross, and thus increase escrow withholdings, which probably will begin at 25 percent this coming season.
It is the union that should be concerned about the proliferation of front-loaded contracts — Scott Gomez, as an example, is receiving $34 million over the first four years of his deal, $17.5 million the final three seasons — and not the NHL.
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There would be no more flawed reason for the Rangers to accept Nikolai Zherdev‘s salary arbitration award than to do so in an attempt to justify trading Fedor Tyutin to Columbus last summer for the winger.
Brendan Shanahan, by the way, does not now nor did he ever have an open invitation to rejoin the Rangers this summer, but he does have an offer on the table to return to New Jersey, where he played his best hockey last season since the first half of his first year (2006-07) on Broadway.
The delay in signing it, we surmise, is because of Shanahan’s ongoing evaluation of what his role would be playing for Jacques Lemaire.
The Bruins, we’re told by a well-placed informant, are talking with “two West Coast” clubs about a deal for unsigned Group II winger Phil Kessel. B’s are allegedly seeking a young roster player, a prospect and a first-rounder.
Chris Drury, a leader by example who takes every defeat personally and home with him, needed a senior veteran presence in the room last year to help deflect the pressure, responsibility and burden of his captaincy.
He still does.
No, we have not heard his name connected to New York even once this summer, but why is it that we have a sinking feeling that Todd Bertuzzi might somehow wind up on the Rangers’ training-camp roster?
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There is, we have been told by two individuals at the Board level, a southern-based NHL team that’s indicated some preliminary interest in moving a handful of October home dates for 2010-11 to Quebec City.
We also have been told that there is essentially no chance of the Board approving such a request should it ever be proposed.
Keep in mind that though the cap is $56.8 million following the PA’s five-percent bump, last year’s league revenues would have generated a cap of approximately $54.1 million.
Thus if revenues decline this year, it will drag down the $54.1 million number. For instance, a 7.5-percent decline in revenue, which seems a realistic if not optimistic projection, would create a baseline cap number of $50.043 million for 2010-11 that would become $52.54 if the PA exercises the inflator — no sure thing.
That $50-52.5 million range for 2010-11 is both the critical number to watch and the reason so many free agents remain unsigned at this late date. There’s no collusion. The market is open, but it’s open for one-year deals.
The sooner unsigned players and their agents recognize reality, the sooner they can take care of business.
See you next month.