Nik the Trik said:
IJustLurkHere said:
Exactly... unemployment insurance. You'd take out a policy which said "I will pay x into insurance fund y. Then when I'm negotiating an RFA deal if negotiations aren't going well, I can continue to get paid out of the fund". It would work on the one to many principle that any given year, few players end up sitting into November, but for many ELC guys, they don't necessarily have the wherewithal of a Nylander to manage their cashflow (due to coming form an objectively wealthy family thanks to his Dad's career) in event of extended absense.
It's a thought bubble, but if I were the NHLPA it's something I'd contemplate.
Well, there's a pretty obvious problem there. The whole point of insurance is that the payout is more than the accumulated premiums, right? Otherwise you'd be just as well off with a savings account. Now, if, say the premiums total 50k or thereabouts and the payoff is 100k or thereabouts by a certain date, wouldn't the player have a financial incentive to not sign until the payout, make money on the insurance and then sign?
Or are you suggesting a group policy that all PA members kick into?
Well, as I said, it's thought bubble of "I bet you could make the numbers work, so I wonder if someone has and I've just never heard of it because it's too mundane for news" rather than carefully considered business case of "someone should do this", but to hash it around a bit:
- Would either need to be PA or some other collective. Insurance needs scale to work, and the number of pro athletes (even if we go beyond NHL, but its leave that aside for now) is a limited pool.
- I'm thinking cashflow more than I'm thinking lump payout. I.e from the first pay check that you miss, you get something from the fund... and while it might seem initially like free money, if your team has issued your qualifying offer, there's an assumption that contract #2 will contain a raise.
- There's a complexity at contract size. Jacob Trouba will be an RFA next summer and is already making $5M. He's a definite holdout candidate, and his cashflow is much greater than Nylander's is now (going off his ELC)... but if you really want it to work, you need everyone paying in, and if you don't cover Trouba, how do you convince everyone to pay in? (black boxing that for now)
- So I guess if the idea is that you're protecting the players jumping from ELC to contract #2 and you've somehow solved the above problem, the numbers are around ~$1M/year base, taxed from ~600 players who are all making that much (minimum), and likely to have a handful of October and 1-2 November payouts, you're looking at asking about 0.5%-1% of the first $M per player (i.e. $5-10k each).
-I'd guess the sell of the PA would be that if you DID have a seriously antagonistic negotiation, and the player needed to go beyond Dec 1, it's in everyone's interest that the teams can't break the player and forcing them to sign a deal seriously against the players interest, which then becomes precedent for future arbitration and negotiation.
I'm sure that beyond the complications of relative cashflow there's plenty of other stuff I'm missing, but that's the level of detail which led me to think "it could work" and therefore whether it already existed.