Was it, at the moment Z signed his was it clear that they were going to hammer it? Or did it become clear when Hossa signed his and there were the widely reported rumors of them negotiating an early retirement... or when Kovalchuk and the Devils made a mockery of the damn thing with that 17 year joke.
I truly don't remember anything beyond "lifetime contracts are a risk because anything can happen". Not "Red Wings are clearly gaming the system".
And I'm not okay with it, because the Wings, Hawks, and whoever were punished for breaking a rule that didn't exist at the time. You want to hammer the contracts like Parise, Suter, Weber, etc... that were signed in 2012 when it was clear as day that something was going to happen with them? I'm okay with that. In January 2009, I don't like that. I don't like going back multiple years to retroactively apply a rule that clearly wasn't even a consideration then.
That would be like if NTCs/NMCs got invalidated in this next lockout or the max term got shortened to 5 years from eight, but the total value of the contract needed to be paid out. Like instead of McDavid at 8/12.5, it's now 5/20 or whatever the max deal is. I wouldn't want that to retroactively be changed.
And lastly, just because they did a sloppy job in negotiating the cap and what you could/couldn't do in 2005's lockout shouldn't give them the impetus to crack down on it. The league negotiated poorly in that first lockout after they won their major concessions. Backdiving contracts were allowed to happen because they didn't dot their i's and cross their t's.
There was immediate talk of these contracts becoming more widespread and that teams were doing an end-run around the cap. Was it immediately clear the league would do what they did? No, and there was a bit of a wait and see if the league would validate the deals. When the league didn't immediately kill these deals, GMs got a little bolder (and dumber - the Kovy deal).
When the GMs decided to do something that was clearly going against what the CBA intended, it had to be a concern that the league would come back on them. And that's how your other examples aren't really like what the GMs were doing with these backdiving deals. Giving guys NMCs or whatever are clearly allowed in the CBA. It's not something being invented out of whole cloth to try to get a leg up and maneuver outside of the CBA.
Everyone knew these deals were a cheat. Maybe, if we want to interpret the CBA as strictly and literally as possible, a legal cheat, but still a cheat.
What was the "spirit of the CBA"?
The spirit of the CBA was the idea of what it was trying to do, and there was actual language in the original CBA that gave the league the power to go after teams that they felt violated that. Such as these backdiving deals. If the league wanted to, they could (and should) have stepped in immediately, refused to okay Z's deal, and killed these things before they got going. If Mouser is around, he'll provide an argument for why the league waited for Kovy's deal to come down on it, but I have always found this the weakest part of what the league did. Waiting was tacit approval, but there were more than a few articles at the time about Bettman's unhappiness with such deals.
If you have a kid and tell them not to have any candy before supper, and they grab a handful of cookies instead, you're not going to buy the argument that the cookies are somehow wholly different from candy and should be okay. What's intended is clear, even if not entirely spelled out.
