Contracts for the Big-3
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Frank E
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Nik the Trik said:
Perhaps, but we're still assuming that his signed deal is significantly better than the one offered in August, and would make up for the lost time.
I'm saying there's still a fair bit of risk attached to holding out like Nylander is doing, and I don't think most hockey players are willing to assume that kind of risk. Obviously, so far, this is the case.
Kin
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Frank E said:
Well, yes. Like I said, I'm using what Friedman said here as the hypothesis.
And I'm really not so sure there is much risk. I think in order for it to be worth it financially to the player a team has to move so little off their pre-training camp number that it would be hard to read their stance as anything other than an almost outright refusal to negotiate. That's tricky enough in a situation like Nylander's where the Leafs are a good team with a lot of exciting young players but in the case of a player who's more critical to his team's success it's really hard to believe that three months of negotiating wouldn't yield a positive financial outcome.
Kin
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Frank E said:
The problem there is that spite doesn't really work for teams. Again, we do at some point have to face the basic economic reality of supply and demand and the truth that talented NHL players are in very high demand. Like I said a hundred pages ago, if all ties between the Leafs and Nylander were severed, it's much much easier for Nylander to find a new team than it is for the Leafs to find a new Nylander.
If a NHL team were really so emotional as to make the sort of decision you're implying they would, I think that's when we'd start to see offer sheets.
IJustLurkHere
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Nik the Trik said:
I've found myself wondering (i.e. I really don't know) whether there's some sort of income protection insurance available to pro athletes to cover these situations. It would seem to me there should be a market, as relatively few actually pursue a lengthy dispute, but it's valuable to be able to indicate a willingness to do so.
Does anyone know?
IJustLurkHere
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Nik the Trik 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.
Guru Tugginmypuddah
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You can pretty much insure anything. The premiums for something like that would be astronomical and hardly worth it.
Kin
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IJustLurkHere said:
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?
herman said:
This isn?t worth arguing about but I don?t think the ?average? GM should care. Because the cap is fixed and equal across teams, paying more to this class of player simply means paying less to some other class of player. GMs that have one or more players that compare well with Nylander will hope he gets a low salary; those that don?t will hope he gets a high salary. (If every GM has a player like Nylander and a similar amount of spare cap space then it doesn?t matter what he makes because no team gains/loses any competitive advantage vs the others.)
IJustLurkHere
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Nik the Trik said:
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.
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