NHL

Rangers aced Richards deal

So it turns out the issue wasn’t so much whether I agreed with Glen Sather and Jim Dolan on the deal the Rangers gave Brad Richards, but whether I agreed with myself.

Yes (or no), that’s correct. I did not want the Rangers to become enmeshed in a bidding war for No. 19. I did not want the Rangers to repeat their sins of the past by bribing a marquee athlete to wear the crest (while being careful never to step on it in the room). I did not want the team to give Richards longer than five years.

But it’s clear this wasn’t bribery that led to a shotgun wedding; this was a marriage. Richards left money on the table to sign. He did not attempt to shake every nickel loose. I had proposed five years at $6.5 million per. Essentially it is six years at $6.67 million per.

The relationship between Richards and head coach John Tortorella makes this different than the all the failed signings preceding it. This isn’t a coach hoping a player can do the job; this is a coach knowing the player can get it done.

And it is the relationship between Richards and Tortorella that allowed the head coach to sell the owner on front-loading to the count of $20 million over the next 12 months, that allowed the coach to vouch for this player as he never could for anyone else.

I can live with this (cue the Rangers’ front office, Richards and his agent, Pat Morris, to exhale).

The players who might have eventually become preferable to Richards given the investment, younger players with perhaps higher ceilings, never do become available. Plus, there is every chance the age of free agency will go up next time.

This was the player. This was the time to declare. It is not about getting younger every year, never has been. It is not about seven years down the road. It is about contending. It is about winning.

Here is my definition of a good owner in New York: 1) He spends money as recommended by the general manager; 2) He does not meddle.

Dolan is a good owner of a New York hockey team.

* The predictable howls the last week over front-loaded contracts are not only music to NHL commissioner Gary Bettman’s ears, they are exactly what the commissioner and his Sixth Avenue hard-cap strategists anticipated upon last September’s adoption of the Kovalchuk Amendment that implicitly legalized deals such as the ones Richards received from the Rangers, Ilya Bryzgalov got from the Flyers, and Christian Ehrhoff got from the Sabres.

The league opened the door with every intention of slamming it shut next time around and of hoisting the front-loaders on their own gold-plated petards.

Bettman and his canny legal team, with aid from unwitting allies or dupes in the NHL Players’ Association office who never once consulted with Kovalchuk before authorizing a collective bargaining agreement amendment in his name, created a perfect storm in which small-minded small-marketers, their uninformed mouthpieces in the media and the GM of the Maple Leafs spent the week throwing around the term, “circumvention,” contrary to the facts.

Forget the nine-year deals both Richards and Bryzgalov signed. The Kovalchuk Amendment not only allows, but encourages an 18-year front-loaded deal for a 21-year-old coming off Entry Level, under which nearly all of the money is packed into the first 10 years as long as the final nine seasons are established at $1 million apiece.

That’s the formula that would get Steven Stamkos on an offer sheet. That’s the formula that would get Drew Doughty. That’s the formula (though adjusted for a 13-year deal running through age 40) that most assuredly would have gotten Zach Parise, which is exactly why the Devils filed for salary arbitration and thus removed the winger from the market.

Anyone who thinks this week caught the NHL by surprise is kidding himself or herself. This is what the league wanted to use as evidence that the system is hopelessly broken and tilted in favor of the big markets — the system, of course, that Bettman, counsel Bob Batterman and the Board invented and painted as a utopia the last time around.

Next time, the NHL is going to introduce the ultimate one-size-fits-all cap. Percentage of the gross will be dramatically reduced. The midpoint will essentially become the cap, with the ceiling and floor separated by perhaps $4 million-$6 million. Deviations of salary within a contract will be kept to a minimum. The cap charge will be defined by the average of the three-to-five highest salaried seasons. Contracts will be kept to a minimum of five-to-seven years.

And the calling card, as if one is required in an era where owners in every sport except baseball are in complete command of the labor landscape, will be last week.

The league put out the bait. The Rangers and the Flyers (and the Sabres, who may be a small market team by definition, but have an owner with a big market mentality) took it, as well they should have. Sixth Avenue couldn’t be more gratified.

larry.brooks@nypost.com