Free Agency and The Cap
Posted 9:34 AM ET | Comments 1
The first day of the Free Agency frenzy started with Daniel Briere going to Philadelphia and it ended with Ryan Smythe signing with The Colorado Avalanche. In between, The Red Wings landed Brian Rafalski and The New York Rangers snatched up both Scotty Gomez and Chris Drury.
The dust hasn’t settled yet and already the cries are rising from Edmonton and Calgary and Buffalo and Columbus. How come the same teams that got the big free agents before the lockout got them again? The word “overpaid’ has been attached to every one of the big free agents signed on the first day of the frenzy. As one blogger put it, “I thought the cap was supposed to protect the G.M.’s from their own stupidity.
This serves as an important lesson in sociology, free enterprise and human nature. You cannot, in the end, completely control market forces or stupidity. You can mitigate the bounds of stupidity or the gap between the "haves and have nots" but you cannot in a free market/society hold back the strong to prop up the weak.
If anything, The Salary Cap has and will continue to drive up the salaries paid to the very top stars of the league. Each time the cap goes up that's more money to lure a top free agent to a wealthy team. This will result in salaries for the rest of the players remaining depressed because the league has engineered an artificially finite pie.
This more than anything could change things in the long run as the vast majority of "have nots" among the players push back against the very few "haves" within The NHLPA. The union could very well demand a more equitable distribution of the cap among players by limiting the amount that a team can pay any one player to a much lower percentage of its overall payroll.
But this too is trying to "engineer the system" to be fair. It would be far simpler to return to a non-cap environment and let the lower tier players command their value in a free market, which would ultimately curb the growth of "star salaries" as teams limit their own spending for their own economic survival. And those that fail to make sound business decisions would fail, and likely be sold and moved.
In a cap environment, we have inflating star salaries, smaller markets and non-traditional markets that cannot keep up with the big spenders, and franchises on the brink of being sold and moved. In another few years The Cap could hit the amounts the high-spending teams were spending prior to the lockout. And to make matters worse, teams and fans simply have no hope of hanging onto their own homegrown stars. It's been widely said that Pittsburg "wont' be able to keep both Malkin and Crosby because ultimately they both cannot be made to fit under the cap. If Pittsburg builds a competitive team, sells out its building and in fact generates enough revenue to keep both absent the cap, there is something fundamentally unfair about that. In a sport that thrives on history and tradition, that’s bad business. And the irony is Pittsburg is one of those struggling, small market teams The Cap was supposed to help.
In the final analysis the lockout and the cap are a failure. I hope it won’t take another lockout to right the ship.
The dust hasn’t settled yet and already the cries are rising from Edmonton and Calgary and Buffalo and Columbus. How come the same teams that got the big free agents before the lockout got them again? The word “overpaid’ has been attached to every one of the big free agents signed on the first day of the frenzy. As one blogger put it, “I thought the cap was supposed to protect the G.M.’s from their own stupidity.
This serves as an important lesson in sociology, free enterprise and human nature. You cannot, in the end, completely control market forces or stupidity. You can mitigate the bounds of stupidity or the gap between the "haves and have nots" but you cannot in a free market/society hold back the strong to prop up the weak.
If anything, The Salary Cap has and will continue to drive up the salaries paid to the very top stars of the league. Each time the cap goes up that's more money to lure a top free agent to a wealthy team. This will result in salaries for the rest of the players remaining depressed because the league has engineered an artificially finite pie.
This more than anything could change things in the long run as the vast majority of "have nots" among the players push back against the very few "haves" within The NHLPA. The union could very well demand a more equitable distribution of the cap among players by limiting the amount that a team can pay any one player to a much lower percentage of its overall payroll.
But this too is trying to "engineer the system" to be fair. It would be far simpler to return to a non-cap environment and let the lower tier players command their value in a free market, which would ultimately curb the growth of "star salaries" as teams limit their own spending for their own economic survival. And those that fail to make sound business decisions would fail, and likely be sold and moved.
In a cap environment, we have inflating star salaries, smaller markets and non-traditional markets that cannot keep up with the big spenders, and franchises on the brink of being sold and moved. In another few years The Cap could hit the amounts the high-spending teams were spending prior to the lockout. And to make matters worse, teams and fans simply have no hope of hanging onto their own homegrown stars. It's been widely said that Pittsburg "wont' be able to keep both Malkin and Crosby because ultimately they both cannot be made to fit under the cap. If Pittsburg builds a competitive team, sells out its building and in fact generates enough revenue to keep both absent the cap, there is something fundamentally unfair about that. In a sport that thrives on history and tradition, that’s bad business. And the irony is Pittsburg is one of those struggling, small market teams The Cap was supposed to help.
In the final analysis the lockout and the cap are a failure. I hope it won’t take another lockout to right the ship.
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