Jaded-Fan said:
Actually collusion if I am remembering right was uniquely a baseball thing. The owners are so wimpy in baseball that they allowed the union to get that clause in their contract so that they could not even get together when costs were getting out of control and agree to keep them somewhat in control.
Baseball owners are composed of pigs and whores. Pigs who gather all the all stars for their bench role players and whore owners who rather than actually fix baseball's problems in the last CBA (and when the top spending team spends over 7 times the collective salaries on players than the lowest spending teams and triple or more what 70% of the teams spend, you have a problem) pocket the chump change.
Again, another reason to love hockey, where they seem to be getting their house in order.
No. It's a lot more than that.
Hockey could have the same kind of collusion that happened in baseball.
Baseball's collusion was real.
It wasn't just that owners weren't giving raises.
They weren't even giving offers to other team's UFAs.
Case in Point: Andre Dawson. Montreal Expos offer him a pay cut. From $1.3 Million a year. To 1 Million a year.
Offended, he goes to the market. He gets nothing.
Not even a sniff. From anyone.
He winds up going to Chicago during spring training and he gives them a blank check. Chicago offers him $500,000 a year for three years.
He takes it, 1, because he's super pissed at the expos, and, 2, because he loves to hit a Wrigley.
His first season in Chicago he hits 49 Homers and wins MVP on a last place team.
That same year, Tim Raines and Jack Morris also had terrible times trying to get an offer.
I don't think you're gonna see scenarios quite so extreme in hockey.
Baseball went from one extreme to the other in the flip of a switch -- they changed the marketplace without talking to the players.
And besides if you had a Luxury tax of some kind, owners could always say, hey, we were getting close to threshold, we didn't want to offer the guy too much.