Tom_Benjamin said:
Because it links salaries to revenues which is inherently a stupid system. Nothing is idiot proof. Nothing changes the fact that some owners behave idiotically. When that happens, somebody has to pay a price. The question is who?
Mike Milbury and Charles Wang should have to bear the burden of the rest of Alexei Yashin's contract. The Rangers should have to pay Holik and Jagr. Under the Gary Bettman designed hockey league, the Yashin mistake comes out of the player's pockets. When someone acts like an idiot in 2008, the money will come out of the player share. It doesn't matter how idiotically the owners behave to the benefit of one player, the rest of the players collectively pay the price for it.
And Ottawa should have had to pay what a stupid arbitrator awarded for Bonk, until he was 31, even if he started floating around like a fairy? And the Ducks, should have been forced to lose Paul Karyia because of a SHORT term deal signed 5 years earlier? You seem to want to punish the owners for poor decisions, but not the players for poor play when a new contract comes around.
You can explain why the current deal works supperbly (you claim all the time, I would put it at more around 90% of the time). The PA, for all their bluster, has NOT tried to fix the problems with the current deal. They have offered no deflators for a players salary when a RFA (their arbitration of 1 per year, 2 every 3 years, 1 timer per player max) is a JOKE, as is the QO change to 100%. The PA, I THINK, could have made a creative non-cost certainty offer and gotten somewhere, instead, they have said no -cap, the only thing we have on the table is a bribe (24% rollback) and a few cosmetic changes.
Tom_Benjamin said:
It won't matter to the owners if Brad Richards makes $50 million or $30 million in his career. If he is a good enough negotiator to get ther larger number, some other player won't get as much. I think it leads to selfishness on and off the field. (Anybody else see it in football and basketball?) It puts an "I" in team, particularly bad teams. If a teammate scores a big deal, less for the guy who rides shotgun.
If the injury rate continues to rise exponentially, player salaries must fall because, after all, the player share of salaries is fixed and if it takes more players to present the product, somebody has to get less. The Gary Bettman designed hockey league takes all the risk involved in contract negotiations and shifts it from the owners to the players.
Is that fair? When everyone admits that the owners are idiots? Somehow there is an assumption that "cost certainty" will convert idiots into guys who will never dish out a bad contract. They will be just as dumb. The difference is in who pays for their stupidity.
Under ANY system, the league will have a finite amount of money, and a finite amount of money they are going to give to the players. Their is no system that will provide a money tree to pay for all this. Cap or no Cap, their is a finite amount of money available for the players. Finally, by putting in profit sharing, the league has moved considerably off of cost certainty (as any money profit-shared wille exceed the cap amount).
Tom_Benjamin said:
They can publicly demand a vote - their media poodles already are - and the players will tell them to bleep off. The season is gone. The players have nothing left to lose this season. The next step is to do everything they can to inflict economic damage on the owners. Turnabout is fair play, right?
Tom
Yes, they can publicly demand a vote, and no, the NHLPA executive doesn't need to heed that request. But based on what they are rumoured to be presenting, the PA is about to get hammered in this dispute like never before, and the pressure will build.
As a final note, Glen Healy (he who has been trashed in this thread) had a DIFFERENT spin on this last NHL proposal than anything before this. And that is why I believe their is hope.