Marconius said:
Flawed analogy. The problem with the cba wasn't necessarily the truly elite players getting paid their due. It was the pluggers and grinders salaries that began creeping up. Players were no longer being payed for the 'job they did,' they were being payed for comparables and a system which inherently escalted them.
(emphasis mine)
Inherently? How so? Jeremy Jacobs didn't have to make the Lapointe signing, but he did. Why? He was being a dick. The Holik signing? More dickery. Karmanos signed and Illitch matched that ridiculous offer for Federov ... why? Because the CBA made it inherently so? That's a crock, and you know it. Truth of the matter is, at the time, the owners thought they were screwing each other ... and it doesn't matter what system is in place ... they'll do it again and again. These are (you'll have to excuse me)
inherently egomaniacal men, who have shown that they'll never pass up an opportunity to stick it in each other. Yet, here you're blaming a system for the weakness of the men who exploit it for their own vanity.
The reason that the NHL has been failing as a business is simply because they have not run it as a business. They have run it as an ego-stroke, and nothing more. The NHL is a p*ssing contest for billionairres, nothing more.
I don't know about you... but there's no salary cap where I work, and I have yet to see a Bobby Holik-style paycheck. Maybe that's because my employers aren't quite as pound-foolish or have quite as much of a God complex as NHL ownership. (And if you had any clue who I worked for, this statement would stagger you).
For what it's worth, I'm not arguing that the system doesn't need fixing, but there is not a credible doubt in the world who got it here or who broke it so badly.