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Originally Posted by GreenLantern2814
Elite players are going to continue to get their money.
Marner is getting $10.9M - he’s more productive than Gaudreau by career PPG.
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Signed in 2019.
Signed in 2018.
2019.
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Bobrovsky: $10M in UFA - yes, he’s a goalie, but he’s an elite 2x Vezina winner.
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2019.
2018.
2019.
At present there are 13 players in the NHL with cap hits of $10 million or more: those you mentioned plus McDavid (2018), Karlsson (2019), Doughty (2019), Toews (2015), Kane (2015), Price (2018), and Kopitar (2016).
Not one contract with an eight-figure cap hit was signed in the off-season of 2020 or 2021. Unless league revenues somehow take a big upswing between now and the end of this season, I don't anticipate any such contracts being handed out in 2022 either. Those contracts were a product of a good economy and an expectation that the cap would continue to rise significantly. That expectation is gone with the ’Vid.
I expect to see a dynamic here that is quite similar to what Norman Spinrad once said about the publishing business:
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Originally Posted by Norman Spinrad
In boom times, when the writers have the power, editors do well too and aren't that much concerned with the greed of their suppliers, since they're only spending the money of a faceless corporation and their status in the corporate pecking order is partially determined by the size of the corporate line of credit. Everyone loves everybody in Fat City.
But when times get a little tough, and the corporate powers that be put the inevitable squeeze on, the job of the editor becomes to pass that squeeze on down to the writers, who have nowhere to pass the diminishing buck except their discontent or ire, and editors tend more to be perceived as the class enemy. When the going gets tough, the tough may get going, but when times get tough, even creampuffs get a little meaner. Nobody loves anybody in a jungle.
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For ‘writers’ read ‘players’, for ‘editors’ read ‘GMs’. The GMs who counted coup in the good times by handing out gobsmackingly huge contracts, if they haven't been fired already, are now in a phase where they count coup by shaving pennies off the budget wherever they can. They know that the cap won't rise fast enough to inflate away their dumb decisions, so if they have to do something stupid, they will do it in the opposite direction.
Since the advent of COVID, the hockey business has been going through a sharp contraction, and while it is likely enough to rebound in the long run, the short run will be painful indeed. Taylor Hall took one in the chops by selling into a buyer's market, taking a 25-percent haircut from his last contract. The NHL is still a gate-driven league, and until crowds at the games return to normal, we're not going to see a return to the days when GMs and owners were happy to hand out long-term cap-busting contracts.