Funny how it goes. Vancouver Canucks' general manager David Nonis was both right and wrong on Monday, in comments he made to a British Columbia Chamber of Commerce luncheon that made everyone in the National Hockey League sit up and take notice.
Nonis was right to criticize the unbalanced schedule on two levels: How unfair it is, in terms of travel to Western Conference teams; and how the schedule isn't as fan friendly as it should be, in an era when the league still needs to make marketing inroads in some of its fringe markets.
But Nonis was wrong to dump all over the new system of free agency, adopted by the NHL as part of the last collective bargaining agreement. Remember, when the NHL locked out its players back in September, 2004, in the hopes of getting its financial house in order, it was understood that the next CBA would featured major givebacks by the players. Commissioner Gary Bettman repeated it over and over again; and players' association executive director Bob Goodenow tacitly understood that their 10-year run of wildly escalating salaries was over.
It was why the NHLPA, two months into the lockout, offered to roll salaries back by 24 per cent. No matter which view you took of NHL economics — the doomsday scenario painted by the Arthur Levitt report or the less dramatic picture described by Forbes magazine — few disputed the overall premise that the league was awash in red ink and something needed to give.
Even at that, it was still a negotiation and as part of the give-and-take that characterizes any negotiation, there had to be something in it for the players — and that something turned out to be a more attractive definition of free agency.
The NHL had by far the most restrictive system of the four major professional sports — and it wasn't necessarily doing them a lot of good anyway, creating such a small pool of available players that the laws of supply and demand simply drove up their collective asking price.
In the old order, teams had a player virtually from the age of 18 until the age of 31, with a handful of minor exceptions. Certainly, for any player of consequence, that 13-year period of servitude was absolute.
For some players, it wasn't much of a burden either. Mario Lemieux loved it in Pittsburgh. Steve Yzerman couldn't see himself playing anywhere but Detroit after a while. But not everybody was always a good fit on the team that drafted him — and the new, relaxed definition of free agency, introduced in 2004, provided them the opportunity to move on at an earlier age.
Accordingly, the league went into the negotiations fully prepared to give ground on this issue — and as with all things related to the CBA — they did it for the greater good of the whole, not in the interests of the individual team. Nonis raised the example of Sidney Crosby and the fact that the Penguins could lose him seven years into his career, at the precise moment that he is maturing into a dominant NHL player. Soon afterwards, Evgeni Malkin could follow him out the door and now Jordan Staal too.
All true. But the reality of the new CBA is that every team has the document in hand; understands how it works; and can prepare accordingly. The Penguins didn't have to sign Staal. That was their decision and they have to live with its consequences.
In some ways, the scenario that Nonis imagined for Pittsburgh already unfolded once — to the Tampa Bay Lightning, who tried to defend the Stanley Cup they won just before the lockout year, minus their starting goaltender and several key supporting players, thanks to the lowered ages for unrestricted free agency in the new CBA. If Nonis thinks Pittsburgh may have a gripe seven years down the road, well, at least they understood the parameters of the new deal when they signed Crosby and Staal as 18-year-olds. Tampa was forced to improvise on the fly.
In some respects, the Lightning will provide a case study for Pittsburgh to ponder down the road — with a key goalie and three important forwards, all entering their peak earning years together.
What to do? Reward them all? Or make a hard decision to let someone — say Staal, or goaltender Marc-Andre Fleury — walk and retain just Crosby and Malkin?
Presumably, the hope is that the Penguins will create an environment so enticing to Crosby, Malkin and the rest that once they have the option to choose a new NHL home, they decide to stay exactly where they are.
That happens more often than not in the NHL — where a player is comfortable with a team, an organization, a city and thus gives his current employer a home-town discount to stay on and make the numbers work. Some, of course, will always chase the last possible dollar and if that turns out to be a player's primary motivation, well, teams may discover that they can live without him, just fine, after all.
