NHL 2012-13 - Half Season Thread

I've never seen a sport go from "just about ready to announce the season is on, get out the podium Wednesday night" to "FUCK THIS! I'M JEREMY JACOBS, IM TAKING MY BALL AND GOING HOME!" so quickly. I'm guessing we lose the season now.

Is anyone on the players side anymore? I know I jumped ship already.

Talk about total destruction of your fan base. It remains to be seen if the NHL can ever recover from this huge cluster fuck.

My local team (The Coyotes) have always struggled to fill seats here in the desert unless they made the playoffs and then the bandwagoners show up in full force. I'm pretty certain after the strike they won't last more than a couple years here even with the new ownership.

Fidlen_sl said:

Is anyone on the players side anymore? I know I jumped ship already.

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After everything the players have given up, the owners aren't moving on a 2 year cba length and a 3 year contract length difference? Yeah, fuck the owners.

I think there is shared blame at this point. I was on the player's side to begin with, but I am crossing the picket lines. I just want some hockey. The cba length and contract length arguments seem incredibly fucking stupid. I understand why the players want longer player contracts and don't see why the owners would care if it is or isn't in the cba (hi, as an owner, how about you just not sign an over rated mediocre player that has one good year to a 15 year contract that is front loaded and then have said player turn out to be a bust?) There needs to be some accountability on the GMs who craft these deals for shitty players. Seems retarded to me that the owners want to limit the harm their GMs can do to their teams because they hire shitty GMs. On the cba length, just wtf?

I don't see why anyone would buy the "players have given up so much" line of argument. Yeah, they have given things up, because they've been making money hand over fist while most of the league loses money or barely breaks even. No shit they're being asked to give back some of their share of revenues, amongst other things. If they aren't willing to do that, then it's pretty much inevitable that at least a couple franchises will fold, and guess what, that means less players and less revenue to get a cut of.

As far as the CBA length goes, the players are stupid to try to argue for a shorter term. Everyone else, especially the fans, wants the CBA to be as long as possible so we don't have to put up with this bullshit again in 6 years.

Contract term limits I personally don't feel are necessary, either. So long as cap circumvention is fixed, I'm fine with letting GM's sabotage their franchise's future with ridiculous long term contracts that they can't get out of or bury in the minors. However! The reality is that the NHLPA is fighting for contract terms that only affect a couple dozen players, out of 700+. And that's really what it comes down to, the NHLPA can protest all it wants that they're fighting for the "average" union member who might have a 5 year career and make league minimum or slightly above it. But really the main bones of contention that the NHLPA has fought for are almost all about couple dozen superstars.

If the owner's last offer had been put to a vote by the NHLPA, we'd probably be playing hockey by now. Or it would have been very, very close. The 500+ "average" NHL players that don't have a hope of seeing 10 year contracts with 9 figures are NEVER going to make the money back from a lost or even abbreviated season. Ever. It's sheer idiocy on the part of the NHLPA to play with fire the way they have, because at the end of the day their membership can never recover the wages that have been and will be lost. They've already agreed on the revenue split, there had been an agreement on "make whole" money. Those two issues will ultimately determine how much money the membership makes going forward. Contract term limits have zero impact on that, other than further stratifying salaries with superstars making far more than the rank and file.

The issue with contract term limits ties into salary cap (which they want lowered) and ultimately the "average" players salary. It will be extremely hard to lower player salaries from what they have become at this point and if you limit their terms to say 7 years for a $100m contract, it takes up a substantially larger cap hit than if it is spread out over 10+ years which in turn leaves a lot less room for the middle to lower tier players (these are contracts Owners are giving out and they aren't reluctantly doing it see: Ovechkin, Kovalchuk, Crosby, Richards etc. I understand the argument with needing parity in the league, but I disagree with lowering the salary cap to what the owners proposed. I like the idea of the salary cap staying up near where it was last year and just providing more variance in how high the more cash strapped teams have to spend to meet the minimum.

Filwen_sl said:

It will be extremely hard to lower player salaries from what they have become at this point and if you limit their terms to say 7 years for a $100m contract, it takes up a substantially larger cap hit than if it is spread out over 10+ years which in turn leaves a lot less room for the middle to lower tier players

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That doesn't make sense. The cap is based on per-season numbers. Whether a contract is 5, 7 or 10 years long if the average salary is 7 million the term is irrelevant as far as the cap is concerned. The only argument for having such long term contracts, in reality, is cap circumvention through back-diving deals. Plain and simple.

Right, so player's cap hits are going to be much higher than what they used to be if you cut contracts to max 5 years like the owners want. Less room for the middle tier players. At least with 8 years, you can spread out a cap hit a bit and put into place some restrictions on salary difference in each year (e.g. the salary can't decrease by more than like $500k each year or by like more than $2 million from year 1 to x). I don't know what the answer is or why the owners want to make this a "line in the sand" when they have the power to limit this themselves outside of the cba. It's like they want it to protect themselves from themselves which makes no sense to me.

Filwen_sl said:

Right, so player's cap hits are going to be much higher than what they used to be if you cut contracts to max 5 years like the owners want.

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Again, that's to cut back on cap circumvention. The system had a gaping loophole in it, one that I still can't believe wasn't thought of when the CBA was negotiated. Look at Shea Weber's contract:

http://capgeek.com/player/1042

The likelihood of Weber playing out the last 3 years of that contract are slim to none, as he'll be 40 give or take. If you take those three years out, suddenly his cap hit goes from 7.86 to 9.72. It's blatantly obvious why the contract was structured as it was, and the NHL needs to eliminate it. So if the market for a player like Weber is truly a salary of 10-14m a year, so be it, that's what the cap hit for it should be as well.

I don't see how that negatively affects middle tier players, to be honest. If you keep the long contracts in, it will still only be 30-50 players who can expect to see such massive, long term deals. Most teams will have one or two of those on the books that take up a significant portion of their cap space, and will fill in the rest of the gaps with middle tier players as best they can. Those middle tier players can expect to keep getting 2-4 year deals at a fraction of the salary of the stars, regardless of whether those stars' deals are 5 or 10 years long, because at the end of the day the NHL will not allow cap circumvention like what we've seen continue.

The whole point of a cap system is to prevent teams from "spreading out a cap hit", not to make it something that every team tries to do in newer and more creative ways with each passing season.

Filwen_sl said:

It's like they want it to protect themselves from themselves which makes no sense to me.

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Where have you been the last 7 years? That was ALWAYS what the cap system was about in the NHL. And indeed in every other pro sport with one.

I think they also want to protect themselves from the unruly players as well. Its alot easier to say to a player that I cant offer you a 15 year term that you want because the CBA says I cant instead of Im sorry we dont like you or trust you will be a good enough player for 15 yrs to offer you that.

Pretty disgusted by Hartnell's comments here:http://www.edmontonsun.com/2012/12/1...-roman-hamrlik

If that's the kind of attitude Hartnell has about his own teammates, then I certainly wouldn't want to count him as one. Harmlik didn't even say anything all that controversial, just that he wanted to get a deal done ASAP and that the membership should be allowed to vote on things. God forbid.

Yea the players are not doing themselves any favours this time around. I really don't recall such vitriol last lockout and I am sure it has something to do with Fehr. Seriously he is quickly starting to look like the worst thing that could have happened to the NHL for a long long time

I agree that the current or previous cap circumvention that GMs/owners/players were pulling was wildly out of line with the true intention of the salary cap. However, I don't think 5 years is that long for a player contract for someone you feel confident in committing to your team. I think they (players and owners) should be able to come to a compromise on both of their positions on this issue and it shouldn't hold up a deal and I also think there are creative ways for owners to keep those longer contracts (say 6-7 years) in check without front loading them with salary per year variance not to exceed a certain percentage of the yearly cap hit or something.

Eomer_sl said:

Pretty disgusted by Hartnell's comments here:http://www.edmontonsun.com/2012/12/1...-roman-hamrlik

If that's the kind of attitude Hartnell has about his own teammates, then I certainly wouldn't want to count him as one. Harmlik didn't even say anything all that controversial, just that he wanted to get a deal done ASAP and that the membership should be allowed to vote on things. God forbid.

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I don't think Hartnell is playing in the NHL because he is a smart guy. He sure doesn't do the NHLPA any favors acting like a goon in the media.

Filwen_sl said:

However, I don't think 5 years is that long for a player contract for someone you feel confident in committing to your team. I think they (players and owners) should be able to come to a compromise on both of their positions on this issue and it shouldn't hold up a deal and I also think there are creative ways for owners to keep those longer contracts (say 6-7 years)

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The NHL's last proposal had an exception for teams re-signing their own players that allowed up to 7 year contracts. Otherwise, if you were signing someone to a contract that wasn't previously your property, it was 5 years. That seems entirely reasonable to me.

Eomer_sl said:

The NHL's last proposal had an exception for teams re-signing their own players that allowed up to 7 year contracts. Otherwise, if you were signing someone to a contract that wasn't previously your property, it was 5 years. That seems entirely reasonable to me.

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I just think that contract length is something that is more important to players than owners and if they are both apart by 1 year, why not just go up to 6 for outside players and say 7 for inside players and call it a compromise. I'd say that is a win for owners considering the last CBA's term limits.

I dont recall seeing anywhere where the players agreed to term lengths. I thought they wanted to be able to sign for as long as they wanted.