I wonder if we’ll hear a familiar refrain from Gary Bettman after this year’s free-agent spending spree.
If I were the commissioner of the National Hockey League today I would probably come up with a new stump quote, you know, the one Gary Bettman uses as an answer for virtually every question on every topic since the league ended a year-long lockout with the players’ association.
Ever since the ink dried on what is now one of the ugliest documents ever agreed to by team owners in any sport, Bettman has been muttering "it’s all good" to just about anything you could throw at him short of Boots Del Biaggio’s checkbook.
As of today, I suspect the commish might be uttering a phrase akin to "what the (fill in your favorite expletive here)."
I mean look at the offer sheets, real and reported:
Brian Campbell to the Chicago Blackhawks at a reported $57.12 million dollars over eight years.
Wade Redden to the New York Rangers at a reported $6.5 million a season for six seasons.
Brian Rolston, at 35 years old, to the New Jersey Devils at $20 million over four years.
Cristobal Huet, virtually a lifetime second-tier goalie, to the Chicago Blackhawks for $5.625 a year for four years.
Ryan Malone, once thought to be an underachiever (though he did improve this past season), to the Tampa Bay Lightning for $4.5 million per year over SEVEN years.
Michal Rozsival, an unrestricted defenceman, re-signs with the New York Rangers for four years and $20 million.
This is cost certainty?
This is the kind of drag on salaries that the NHL shut down for a full season to obtain?
And for the record folks, the big guns haven’t even weighed in yet.
Oh sure, there’s a rumoured $20 million for two years said to have been put on the table by the Vancouver Canucks for the aging Mats Sundin. Print that rumour yesterday and I would have laughed right out loud.
Now, well it may well be true, but it may also just be the starting point in what should make Sundin rich beyond anyone’s expectations for this stage of his career AND likely push the bar a good deal higher for the younger and seemingly more desirable Marion Hossa.
And if Brian Campbell, a speedy puck-handling defenceman with a less than stellar reputation as a big game performer in playoff competition is worth an average of $7.14 million per season for what likely amounts to the rest of his useful playing life, what is the market value for Brooks Orpik, Pittsburgh’s stay-at-home physical stud who excelled in his own end in helping Pittsburgh to the Stanley Cup final this past spring.
Surely he’s worth as much or more than the fading Redden and his $6.5-million average salary or the still young Mike Green’s $5.25 million a season for four seasons as determined by his team of last season, the Washington Capitals.
Forget the fact -- for the moment -- that the brunt of all this extraordinary money being paid and still to be paid runs on a copper wire directly from the wallets of fans across North America and into the pockets of players via the generosity of general managers who have yet to grasp the meaning of the word prudence, and ask yourself one very simple question:
Is this good for anyone except the players?
It can’t be good for owners. Admittedly the salary cap is up and, theoretically, the owners are playing with the players’ money in that the players can’t get any more than a 50-plus percentage of income as determined by owners and players’ accountants.
That’s fine on paper, but when the common refrain from ownership in the mid and small markets, markets by the way that by far make up the majority of teams in the NHL, is that not only is the $56-million cap out of reach for many, but the $40.7-million floor is a problem as well, that’s not a good thing.
Ticket prices are rising virtually as fast as the cap and the floor and, given what we’ve seen in the first three seasons of this agreement, there is no end to that in sight.
One might argue that the prices might come down a bit as the lowering of the unrestricted age of free agency gets lower still next summer, but that’s hardly a certainty. After all, the reason that the prices were so high this offseason was, in part, because there were so few quality free agents on the market.
Of course the reason for that is that GMs moved to sign a slew of their own players to stunningly long deals in an effort to keep them for their best years (an effort we might point out almost completely nullifies what an open and well populated free-agent market is supposed to do). Seeing what the market has brought forth in terms of salaries this time around, it’s a pretty safe bet that GMs will move to lock up even more of their own through the course of this coming season.
That means a player like Buffalo goaltender Ryan Miller has, without so much as even having to get out of the first round (or perhaps even making the playoffs), a right to expect the Sabres will make an offer that more than doubles his salary and for longer than he’s been in the league to date even though he didn’t have a great year last season. And if the Sabres don’t, they can watch him go to untold riches in free agency, all before he’s played five years in the NHL or even come close to the magic number of 30 years old, the age when an NHL goaltender is thought to be just coming into his prime.
GMs have to take some of the blame for that. Owners too, but for the record, this is what commissioner Gary Bettman has wrought: a stunningly out of control escalation of salaries, a stunningly similar era in which wealthy large-market teams can wreak havoc with the budgets and payrolls of their smaller so-called partners, a stunningly one-side advantage for players who despite giving back a quarter of their salaries across the board to help settle the lockout are now making it back hand over fist.
Most of all, Bettman has delivered a stunning slap to the face of hockey fans who backed him to the zenith when he demonized said players as greedy and promised lower ticket prices and a reining in of unbridled spending.
Oh and did we mention that only the players can end this one-sided money grab before the much-touted idiot-proof CBA comes to an end at the end of the 2011-12 season and that the owners and the customers have no say until the players say it’s over or it dies its natural death?
And what happens then? Surely the players won’t want to give back their contractually earned gains. Surely the owners, knowing the fans, at least the fans in Canada, will always come back (didn’t the post-lockout season prove that), will argue mightily for yet another lockout to fix everything that’s oh so wrong on their side once again.
What will Bettman -- assuming he’s not fired beforehand -- say then?
Surely "cost certainty" won’t be a rally cry that will be heartily embraced then.
After all, if it’s "all good" now, what will be the definition of bad?
Perhaps Sundin, Hossa and Orpik are about to tell us.