well ... yeah ... i guess ...

but then the teams that overspent for no reason are run by idiots

they brought this issue upon themselves bc they just assumed that they'd win some kind of a rollback like last time

but the players *gasp* insisted on having their contracts (many signed just months ago) honoured, the nerve!

Some classic union busting techniques brought into play tonight. Triumphs 5% meter is now redlining.

Can we just offer to sacrifice Marian Gaborik to the hockey gods and call it a day, and get on with this season?

Why are they run by idiots? If you can theoretically get a discount on a player by signing them to a long term deal, why not freeroll that it will be honored in the new CBA? Crosby's deal comes to mind - if they don't extend him before the old CBA expires, they can only sign him to a 5-year deal under the new CBA, meaning he'll probably see 2+ more contracts. Under this contract, he's a Penguin for life and won't need to negotiate a new deal during some of his most procductive seasons (though he'd sign for $8.7M anyway).

Reiterating what Triumph said, a lot of the players came out ahead with the buyouts last time. It's not like that saved them boatloads of cash.

They intended to have a contract honored, signed under an agreement that has since expired? Signing these deals was a freeroll for the players for the same reason it was for the owners.

I don't think freeroll means what you think it means. Its pretty obvious there were negative consequences to signing those deals.

Such an offering may offend tho

look obviously at least 10% of the union has no patience for this at all - fringe players will take virtually any deal that opens the doors. then there's another portion of the union who are probably close to busto and will take any deal for similar reasons. but someone made this point - look at how fehr and bettman reacted tonight, who seemed more composed?

basically what i was gonna say, but much more concise

thanks for saving me the 2000 words, and everyone else from having to scroll past them

didn't see Fehr speak tonight, but Bettman & Daly seemed pretty choked, so Fehr?

Not as much as the Schenn bros.

Any deal signed before the old CBA expired has no guarantee to be honored 'as is' under the new agreement. Knowing this, if you're the Penguins, would you rather:

A. Have Sidney Crosby under contract through 2025 for $104M.
B. Have Sidney Crosby entering the last year of his deal, UFA after 2012-13.

The Penguins obviously are going to sign the long contract, banking on a steady cap hit through Crosby's age 26-36 seasons. If they hold off as to 'not sign an agreement they have no intention in honoring,' wait to sign him under the new rules, whatever, they'll be forced to sign him for a shorter term, possibly for a higher AAV.

Should contracts like Crosby's be honored in the new CBA, the Penguins have Crosby on the books for 12 years (at a discount), instead of 5. Should a rollback occur, the Penguins are absolved of 7 years' salary liability. It's likely a win-win in either scenario, so the team might as well try and secure Crosby to a longer, more cap-friendly contract now. It's a freeroll because they have nothing to lose and 5+ years of Crosby under a +EV contract to gain.

On the flip side, if you're Crosby, you have nothing to lose signing a $104M contract given your concussion history and the general logistics surrounding signing a $104M contract. There's no guarantee you'll get longer than than a 5-year deal under the new rules, so why wouldn't you sign one that, if honored, makes you set for the rest of your life?

Put concisely, under these deals, the team gets extra service from the player for a discount while the player gets more guaranteed money than they otherwise do under a new CBA.

The ability to have these discount contracts honored may have hinged upon the beliefs behind a widespread rollback, but I have to think some sort of amnesty period is inevitable anyway. Again, most players make out ahead in that scenario.

If the owners 'give' to honor preexisting contracts (signed under an expired agreement), and the players 'give' on new contract limits/buyouts, we'll probably have a deal. We'll have a rollback through the amnesty period and limited spending moving forward, but old deals remain guaranteed. I agree that guys like Kovalchuk, Hossa, et al. should have their deals honored that were signed in the spirit of the old CBA.

However, guys signing 5+ year contracts at the gun knew exactly what they were doing - freerolling for maximum guaranteed money. The notion that it was solely the owners signing players to deals with the intention of reducing them later just isn't true.

Brayden > J. Schultz

Luke < A. Huskins

This is a good point. The owners seem like they're trying to 'shift the middle' as long as possible, but their window is closing and they'll end up meeting the players soon.

Bingo

And all they offered was 90M of the players own money. lol greedy bastards.
Next stop, January.

New highlight of the lockout is definitely the really dumb twitter exchange between Bob McKenzie and Bill Simmons from last night.

Cliffs? Cant really check twitter now

I thought Bettman reacted like a crazy jilted girlfriend because he was genuinely angry that Fehr outplayed him at the mike yesterday, getting up in front of the press and telling them that they were on the verge of a deal ... so when the deal did not happen (as Fehr knew), everyone would be angry at the owners. Which is pretty much exactly what happened.

The most ominous sign IMO was when the owners offered the 300 million, then the players came back and said Ok cool, now we also want this this and this (or something like that) ... and then apparently some of the owners got really pissed off, The leafs owner turned purple, some of the other owners were really insulted as well and that's about when things broke off.

I dunno, maybe this is all posturing, maybe the chances of a deal are still 95% (Triumph, your opinion?) and it's just a matter of time yada yada yada. I honestly have no idea - that is, I am not very optimistic at this point, but I may be overreacting, maybe this is all just "part of the game".

Or ... maybe it's really bad now. Maybe the owners are sincerely insulted by what happened yesterday and that's why they took their offers off the table and will take a really hard line now and the season is doomed.

Really unfortunate. It sounds like the players response to the 300 million offer wasn't well thought out, wasn't presented in a diplomatic fashion, but what do you expect, they are hockey players FFS not professional negotiators. Sounds like they could have used a bit of help at that point.

First time I've ever seen Bettman in a presser. I can totally see why people hate him. What an unpleasant man. And all this rhetoric he was spewing yesterday, just unreal. He came across like a flaming a..hole and I wanted to bitchslap him.

cwicemvp - None of that addresses the point that offering those huge contracts right before crying poor in the CBA negotiations has an effect on how those negotiations go. How large an effect is debatable - but its there.

there are two points here. the first has to do with the parties' expectations and how that affects the intrinsic sense of fairness of their current positions. i'm not concerned about that, since as i said before, there is no such thing as intrinsic fairness in a cba. what's fair is what the parties eventually agree to. end of story.

my point with respect to the fairness aspect is, the contracts signed under the old cba were signed with the explicit condition and understanding by both sides that they would be affected by the new cba. there was no reasonable expectation that the player would get 100% of the salary. both sides knew that the new cba would see a reduction in the players share of hrr. both sides knew that this meant that contracts would [still] be subject to escrow, and that the amount taken out of escrow would be even more than it was under the old cba. therefore, nobody ever should have expected full value out of a contract whose term exceeded beyond the expiration of the old cba.

but my main point was simply a response to 72o's statement that the owners haven't offered any concessions. regardless of the subjective or objective reasonableness of expectations, the owners are under no legal obligation to honor contracts using the rules of the old cba. they could have maintained the position that revenue sharing means exactly what it says: that the existing contracts are to be reduced (or increased) in escrow according to whatever split the new cba dictates. that would be a legally permissible position, and one that in my opinion is perfectly reasonable to take if the parties are truly committed to revenue-sharing.

therefore, it is absolutely a concession for the owners to offer a make-whole (or make partially whole). a 300 million dollar concession, if we are to believe both sides' description of the issue.

same point, but the contradiction in the bolded kinda goes to the heart of my position. nothing here has been or will be unilateral.

I think the owners came in thinking if they could get Fehr out of the room, they could make a handful of concessions that they saved for their "final answer", use their superior bargaining ability, and get the players to cave. They miscalculated. There's a reason Don Fehr is good at what he does. The owners are pissed because they thought they largely could dictate how this is going to get resolved, and it's not working out like that for them.

Nootka - I'm not sure how you can classify a "concession" as anything but something related to the status quo.

So if your point is that the old CBA is gone - then there's really no such thing as a concession at all since there are no positions to compare against. It's just negotiating.

But your view that we trash the old CBA, but keep the principle of revenue sharing (without specific numbers), and so any move from pure revenue sharing to guaranteed income is a concession just seems strange to me.

I have little sympathy for the whining being done by the owners right now. This whole "We gave them 300 million and then they didn't just give in on everything else is so unfair" is bull****.

Both sides do the exact same thing. They get a concession and then say "what else have you got for me". Bettman did the same thing last time when the players finally gave in on a salary cap.

from fehr's email to the players last night:

anyone have thoughts on the bolded? i don't know much about the nba cba or how it has affected salaries. i wasn't under the impression that the middle class was squeezed in the nba when i hear about mediocrities like trevor ariza making 6.8 million.

if there's still going to be a restriction on the max salary any one player can make (has anyone heard if this is included in the current negotiations?), then how would limiting contract term polarize salaries? seems like this could be a ploy by fehr to galvanize support from the rank and file who are probably closest to rebelling against him.

The sides are too close for there not to be a season. And as I've said before, the threat of a season missed is grave for the NHL - they had the backing of the fans in 2004-05 to a much greater extent than they do now. There won't be any Thank You Fans! or any of that.

Nootka: That's semantics, though. I understand your point, but I don't consider it a legitimate concession - it's a concession wrapped in a non-concession. The players are going to agree to it, but let's call a spade a spade.

maybe we can get someone from the NBA thread in here, but i'm of the opposite opinion than Fehr - I think the NBA middle class is overvalued because basketball talent is distributed far more unevenly than talent in MLB or the NHL - salaries to top players are limited, so more trickles down to the hoi polloi. I think he is dead wrong, but I think it has to be rhetorical because there's no way NHL players inherently understand how the NBA works.

there almost certainly will be but no one is close to the maximum salary right now in the NHL. the biggest cap hit is alex ovechkin at 9.5, but the maximum salary allowable under the cap as is is 14.05M. that's an enormous disparity - it's nearly 50% higher than the highest cap hit.