Eastside's Hockey Elite Collide

The Chicago ‪#‎Blackhawks‬ have re-signed Jonathan Toews & Patrick Kane to 8 year contracts worth $84M or $10.5M AAV!

They deserve it!!

NHL looks to be heading for another lockout with the way this free agent season shook out. Teams are embracing analytics and it's changing player values and they're just escalating higher and higher.

Commissioner (CBJ) wrote:NHL looks to be heading for another lockout with the way this free agent season shook out. Teams are embracing analytics and it's changing player values and they're just escalating higher and higher.

I'm sure there will be another lockout because the owners have won every single one so why would they stop?

It doesn't even matter what player salaries are. Escrow guarantees that players always get the same % of revenues. How that gets distributed amongst the NHLPA is not a concern to the owners. They got cost certainty and the league isn't in any kind of existential crisis (not that it ever was) and certainly won't be once the Rogers deal kicks in. But again, the owners stand to make more bank by locking out the players than not, so they will do so whenever they can.

Having said all that, 10.5 million out of a ~75 million cap isn't way out there. That's 14% of the cap in the first year. Crosby's first big contract started at 8.7/56 or 15.5%, and that was seen as a discount because he's obsessed with 87. You also have to keep in mind that a lot of the other huge contracts in the league have bullshit cap-circumventing years tacked on to artificially lower their cap hits. Take off the last 3 years of Suter's deal and he's getting 9.4 per. Weber's getting 10.4 per in the first 10 years (lol) of his deal and just 6 million over the last 4. I guarantee someone's going to bitch fiercely about recapture penalties when they start hitting.