NHL Should Investigate The Salary Cap, Not Pronger/Hossa Contracts

Whether you call it "working within" or "working around" the salary cap, NHL GM's have figured out how to sign big money players in the salary cap era.

Vincent Lecavalier, Alexander Ovechkin, Mike Richards, Henrik Zetterberg, and Johan Franzen have all signed ridiculously long contracts that pay them what they're worth without putting a large dent in the salary cap.

This summer, Marian Hossa and Chris Pronger have been signed to similar "cap friendly" long-term deals, 12 and 7 years respectively.

However, these are deals the NHL thinks might not be entirely kosher.

Why?

Well, because the big money paid out in the front end of the contract seems to correspond directly to the projected effectiveness of the players.

Hossa is 30 and will get roughly $7.9 million a year for the first 7 years of his new contract.

Pronger is 34 and will get about $7 million a year for the first 4 years of his deal.

How many NHL players play beyond age 37?

A hair under 2%.

As an aside, did you know that the average retirement age of NHL players is 24?!

So, clearly, the Blackhawks and Flyers feel that they've identified each player's longevity and have structured a deal that reflects that.

This is exactly what was done with the aforementioned contracts of Lecavalier, Ovechkin, Richards, Zetterberg and Franzen.

The NHL had no qualms with those, so why are they taking issue with the Hossa and Pronger contracts?

Because it lays bare a "flaw" in the salary cap that calculates the average paid out to a player over the life of the contract rather than the actual salary paid each year.

The problem NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman has with this is that it somewhat defeats the (stated) purpose of the cap in the first place: parity.

In each of these cases, the player was either signed by the team that drafted them and with whom they want to stay or by a team that is poised for long-term success.

Good players want to play for good teams, simple as that.

Bettman saw the salary cap as a way to turn marginal teams like Phoenix and Atlanta into contenders.

Almost five years into the cap era, Phoenix and Atlanta are about as close to winning a Stanley Cup as they were prior to the lockout, which is to say light years away.

So why take issue with the Hossa and Pronger contracts and not the others?

Well, you have to start somewhere, and now that it is clear that such contracts allow you to lessen your cap hit, Bettman will need to deter others from employing the same strategy if the cap is to maintain legitimacy.

And that's the problem.

The cap, in it's current structure puts good teams in bad positions and does little to help bad teams get into better positions.

Take Hossa as an example.

Detroit would have loved to have kept him, and he stated he would have liked to stay.

But there was no way to keep him without losing Zetterberg or Franzen to free agency.

Zetterberg and Franzen were no-namers when they were drafted but turned into legitimate stars that were due a huge raise and Detroit paid them accordingly.

So, the implied message here is, if you want to keep those players you've drafted and developed and want to sign premier free-agents...well, you can't.

Hossa left Detroit to join the Chicago Blackhawks, a team loaded with homegrown talent, most of whom are currently underpaid.

The reason Chicago needed to reduce Hossa's cap hit to roughly $5 million per year is that those damn greedy Blackhawks actually have designs of keeping guys like Patrick Kane and Jonathan Toews by paying them what they're worth!

What a shameful display of avarice.

The cap prevented Detroit from keeping Hossa and may prevent Chicago from keeping players like Patrick Kane.

This just doesn't seem right.

Why should a team have to treat a free-agent player and a homegrown player the same way?

Instead of investigating the contracts of Pronger and Hossa, the NHL should add a dash of logic and fairness to the cap by lessening the cap hit of players that are drafted and signed by the same team.

If you sign a player you draft and develop into a premier player, keeping that player would be easier if only say, 60 percent of their salary counted against the cap.

This would allow a team to benefit from their investment, and still be able to be competitive in the UFA market.

It might have allowed Detroit to keep Zetterberg, Franzen AND Hossa, or allow Chicago to keep Hossa and Jonathan Toews AND Patrick Kane.

As they say, "If you're not cheating, you're not competing".

While I don't think the Flyers or Blackhawks "cheated" here, a cap that would help them to keep their own players and bring in new ones would eliminate the mere appearance of impropriety and protect them from such biased scrutiny.

Bettman, investigate the cap, not the contracts.