Mr BLUEandWHITE said:
thats a stupid part of the CBA i mean if the player and the team agree to re-negotiate then why not i dont see the harm in that
The problem is the NHL chose to use the average of the remaining years in a contract as the salary cap hit for a given year. Lots of odd rules were needed to prevent salary cap loopholes as a result.
Lets say a player has a contract that drops in value over a few years
Say Year 1 : $4 mill
Year 2: $2.5 mill
Year 3: $1.5 mill
Year 4: $1 mill
Thats a $9 mill contract over 4 years. The player would get paid $4 mill and cost $2.25 mill to the salary cap in year one.
Lets say the players then renegotiates his contract so that he makes $4 mill again in year 2.
Thats a problem as it would create a salary cap loophole. He made $4 mill but only "cost" $2.25 mill because of anticipated drops in salary he would have in the future (but never actually happened). So they set rules to control contract renegotiations.
Of course this sets up some other unintended consequences like this Mogilny situation.
That is the problem with making large CBA changes in a short period of time. Unintended consequences are more likely because we have not had a chance to see the effects of incrementally adding the new rules but instead add them all at once.