[GioforPM]

Originally Posted by Oling_Roachinen

I'm pretty much saying it didn't. Sure maybe 0.5 here that would have been spent on whatever aging UFA they spent on anyways that year but nothing remotely of significance. My point was the best players were already making 10M as UFA, so Hall making "only" 6M shows the RFA discount the Oiler's got.

It was the highest RFA contract at the time, no?

That's literally impossible if we're talking about actual salary. There's no way that an increase in RFA contracts would result in an increase in UFA salaries. Have you never had cake? If you have a nice plan to give everyone a certain size piece of it and then last second decide to give Hall a great big piece instead, you can't turn around and give everyone else a big piece too, there isn't enough cake. Again, players get 50% of HRR, it's a defined number. If RFA's start getting paid more, UFA's get paid less.

No, what happened was high end UFA salaries went up to compete with RFA salaries, and journeymen got squeezed out. UFA’s don’t care about the team cap nor middling ability teammates. And the Oilers didn’t have to worry about their pending UFAs because they didn’t have anyone good. But across the league you had pending UFAs saying “look what Eberle got”

All of this comes back to Sutter and Kiprusoff's contract. The inflation wasn't from RFA's, it was from retirement contracts that had players like Paris and Suter earning 10M a year until they retire at the age of 106 but because there contract was two centuries long they were able to play games with the cap to reduce it below their salaries. But players don't give two ####s about this imaginary number that fans do, they care about cash and when all the best players are making 10M+ despite what their cap may be, they're going to want that too even if the NHL decides that 200 year old contracts are no longer allowed.

Inflation can come fro more than one place.