If you were a chef making $100/hour, you've got a wife, kids, a mortgage, a new car to pay for. Your boss tells you the restaurant is losing money and he's going to cut your pay to $75 and you said "no way" and get lockout out, then ended up at McDonalds for $5/hour: $75/h or $5/h flipping Big Macs? How much leverage does that create? Next to none, your boss knows $5/h isn't going to keep you there for long. Maybe if you were getting $40/h or $50/h you'd have leverage.
The amount of money they get in Europe isn't going to be sufficient to keep them happy for long, they know it and the owners know it. Playing in Europe is a distraction, its a working holiday, not a serious alternative (its the $5/h McDonalds job). Its nice for the foreign players like Naslund, Forsberg, etc to get to play at in their home countries, but that warm fuzzy feeling is about all. What if Thornton and Nash blow a knee, get a serious concussion or injure their backs? At best they bring home 20% of what they would make, at worst they get injured and waste a year or two of their careers and never be as good again.