The Iconoclast said:
100% qualification is an inflator? How so? It's a statement of status quo. It doesn't even give the player a COLA, so by rights the player falls behind on the inflation curve alone. If the teams use the 100% qualifier as it should be utilized, then it is not an inflationary mechanism. The only way it can become an inflationary mechanism if someone allows it by choosing to pay someone beyond the qualification level. The qualification level itself is not inflationary.
Such fundamental misunderstanding on qualifying offers is disturbing. Qualifying offers represent the lowest a team can pay for a restricted free agent without him going on the open market. If he is qualified, very rarely will a player sign for less than the amount he was qualified for (I'm not sure it's even happened). Often during negotiations, the player agent will high-ball an offer to the GM. The two sides then meet
somewhere in between the high-ball and the qualifying offer. There are only two ways that a team can go from a qualifying offer at 100%. Either straight level, or up. That constitutes an inflator.
The Iconoclast said:
Atually you are dead wrong. You have not thought it through and considered the concept or the way arbitration can now be utilized and in what context the mechanism can be used in concert with the other mechanisms to create the drag. The players have given on the rookie salaries and their big buy back is free agency at 28. So we will use those two parameters to outline how a GM worth his salt would use his single arbitration hearing that he can use with a player during that player's career to hold the salaries in check.
A player is drafted at 18/19 and need not be signed for a year to two years. So by rights a player does not get signed until he is 20. That contract is a four year deal and has a maximum level on it of less than a million per. When that contract is up the team need only qualify the player at 110% to retain the rights to said player. That still leaves the contract at under a million per. Unless the player has been lighting it up (at which point the team would pay anyways) the player would be forced to accept the offer and perform well enough to gain arbitration rights. If the player has played well the team gives him a good one year contract. If the player does not perform again the team uses arbitration and gets the player under contract one way or another at a price they like and guarantee they retain his rights to the year before he becomes a UFA. At that point they are in a position to make what ever long term offer they like or allow the player to go free and attempt to sign him at a cheaper price. And all of this is set up because the NHLPA guaranteed the NHL teams a single arbitration against a player during his career and also pushed the rookies under the bus, giving the teams the entry level contracts that set the whole premise up. Will all contracts follow this road map? No, but it is a damn good template to put every player on and guarantee you only pay for success. In short, the BIG wins the NHLPA extracted from the NHL (lesser of what they had previously) has actually played into the hands of a GM with the slightest clue.
There's a little something called contract negotiation that you fail to take into account. A player
is not forced to accept a qualifying offer, and then the two sides negotiate. Some players will accept the qualifier because they didn't perform to potential. Every other player is going to attempt to negotiate their contract up. Some will succeed, some will not. This is the nature of this kind of thing, as I stated above. You act like the owners/GMs are really going to be able to stand up to the players/agents in most instances and we all know from experience that's not true. It will be curtailed by the cap, but the nature of NHL contract negotiations isn't going to change drastically.
Players can still walk away from arbitration. Add that to the fact that the team-elected arbitration isn't going to happen as often as the player-elected arbitration and most of what you said is out the window because of different sets of reasons for arbitration. Remember, if both sides has precisely the same rights, then I wouldn't be saying it's a win for the NHLPA, I'd be saying it's a tie.