hockeytown9321 said:
I'm for a solution that works for both sides. The owners get their linkage, the players don't get a cap.
Linkage
is a cap. The only solution that works for this fan that lets the owners get what they want is similar. Leave the CBA as is, but add escrow. If the owners are owed a piece of the amounts held back from the player paycheque, it is divided 30 ways. Thus the owners who force the player share up, who have the most salary escrowed, pay a penalty if the result exceeds the player share of the revenue.
The players would reject it because the result still places an arbitrary cap based on a peercentage of arbitrary revenue. IIt doesn't matter to the players whether teams are actually capped. Linkage is a cap.
A more interesting question is whether the owners would accept something like that. I think probably not.
For the revenue side, the owners want a lot more player movement and earlier free agency. This is critical to them because small markets have most of the good players and big markets have hardly any on the right side of 30. More player movement has to move talent from the small markets to the large because the small markets have talent and the large ones don't.
Since my favoured solution that links revenues to salaries doesn't do much for the big markets except make them more profitable, I don't think it would fly with the owners. I think free agency at 27 is as important - perhaps more so - to the owners as cost certainty.
Tom