SO WHAT will the Caps do this sum mer when a team – and there will be a team, Alex Ovechkin can take that to the bank, too – extends an offer sheet to emerging star and impending Group II free agent defenseman Mike Green for, oh, seven years at $6 million per?
What will the Flames do when Dion Phaneuf remains unsigned long enough to extract either an offer or an offer sheet in the 10-year, $90M neighborhood coming off his Entry Level contract?
How much money will the Penguins have to pay Evgeni Malkin to keep him from becoming a Group II free agent when his current contract expires?
What will the Blackhawks do when Jonathan Toews and Patrick Kane both come up for extensions two summers from now?
And what kind of a league is it, and what kind of a system is it, exactly, under which the NHL operates, where an immense and dramatically increasing percentage of the players’ overall take goes to athletes who have been in the league for three seasons as opposed to those who have played for 10 or 15 years?
This is going to become a signal internal issue for the NHLPA membership, once the players actually begin to pay attention and understand the ramifications of a developing hard-cap salary structure driven by management’s fear of allowing players in their early 20s to hit the Group II, offer-sheet market.
There’s a remedy for this, of course, though it’s impossible to know whether either the PA or the NHL would go for it in the next round of CBA negotiations. And that would be to extend the Entry Level system from its current three years to six years, with unrestricted free agency following immediately thereafter.
Look, the Ovechkin signing should be great for the Caps and for the fans in Washington. It should be great for Ted Leonsis, too, especially since the signing will be subsidized through revenue sharing by the league’s successful franchises.
But let’s amend that. The signing, in fact, will be subsidized by every other player in the NHL through escrow withholdings that are sure to flow into the pockets of people like Leonsis, who in real life couldn’t need the money less.
And so, Michael Nylander had better enjoy the benefits of playing with Ovechkin the next three seasons, because he’s actually going to be paying part of his teammate’s salary.
But then better to be Nylander in that context than, say, Martin Brodeur, who will be paying Ovechkin even as he competes against him.
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Craig Leipold‘s payoff from the league for rejecting a significantly better offer for the Predators from Jim Balsillie so he could sell the team for less money to more accommodating folks, came quickly when he was able to flip the Nashville sale into now pending ownership of the Wild.
This is Gary Bettman‘s league, with Gary Bettman people in place from coast to coast, and no one should ever mistake that.
He is the ultimate owners’ commissioner. In his world, there probably is no greater compliment.
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Prodded by the NHLPA, the league’s All-Star skills competition will be revamped in an attempt to bring some sizzle back to the event. But we’re told that while the league has accepted changes in the format of the shootout, speed-skating competition and Young Guns contest, the NHL rejected a request from the NHLPA for formal sitdown to review the program.
When Leonsis on Friday told ESPN.com that a significant difference between the 13-year, $124M extension to Ovechkin and the seven-year, $77M contract extension the owner granted Jaromir Jagr in 2001 after getting him from Pittsburgh was that, “Our fans love Alexander Ovechkin [but] did not love Jaromir Jagr,” he just forgot the part about how attendance increased by nearly 2,000 a game in Jagr’s first season in DC, right?
Or did he really mean to say, “our head coach Ron Wilson did not love Jaromir Jagr?”
Snapshot: Elite Eight: 1. Detroit; 2. Ottawa; 3. San Jose; 4. Anaheim; 5. Devils; 6. Calgary; 7. Dallas; 8. Pittsburgh.
Well, here’s one to brighten the commissioner’s day. For guess whose name has surfaced as a potential candidate to assume command of the Maple Leafs’ hockey operation?
Fellow by the name of Bob Goodenow . . . you may have heard of him?
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Finally, what a hoot to listen to Bob Clarke, the last politically incorrect executive standing inside the NHL, deliver his views on the Steve Downie–Jason Blake incident.
Glen Sather used to be politically incorrect, but that was before he stuffed a gag in his mouth he removes only when surrounded by writers who covered the Oilers when he was in Edmonton.