Mother Nature is NHL players best friend.

Who is this new CBA for?
Players say they are fighting for the next generation.
Very admirable and very misguided.

The players concerns should be reversed.
Take care of the players before you who built the union that you have benefited from.  The number of former players who are currently destitute, living below the poverty line and struggling just to live,  is shameful.  A simple deduction of 0.5% each year from every NHL player and a matching amount from the NHL would solve the problem but they both refuse.  Its not even a discussion topic in CBA talks.

Look at the NFL’s Legacy Fund where both sides contribute to ensure players who were union members prior to 1993 are properly taken care of.  The current emergency care program the NHL has is a way of easing their conscience making them believe they are doing something important to help.  The fact is the current NHL program falls woefully short.

The future players are the ones to be taken care of?   The ones who can not be paid less than half a million dollars per season by rule of the CBA?   The ones who inherit the highest average salary of any NHL generation?   The ones who will gladly take your job (and if current habits continue) he will forget anything you may have done to improve the game or his place in it?

After the last CBA dispute caused the cancellation of an entire season 240 players didn't play another NHL game.  The season lost ended their careers.  Each year about a thousand players play in the league.  At any given time there are about 750 members of the NHLPA.  Currently 667 of them have contracts.  After this year only 398 will have guaranteed jobs.  After 2014/15 only 198 have jobs and after 15/16 only 124 have jobs.  Everyone else is rolling the dice.

A few things we know for sure.  No matter what the financial system is in the NHL,  the best players will get paid about the same amount regardless of the system.  The Cap System proved that.  Another thing we know for a fact,  owners and GM’s can not control themselves.  Give the new system a year or two and owners and GM’s will find all the loopholes to circumvent their own system just like they did last time.  That is the inadvertent bonus the players can always count on.

In the last CBA players had to give back 24% of their salaries and submit to a cap.  Appears to be a complete loss in the negotiations world.  Turns out 7 years later, revenues grow by a billion dollars a year and the average player salary rises by a million dollars a season simply because owners cant control themselves.

Players lamenting having to give up 24% back then,  ended up getting raises over the course of the last 7 years of 300%, 400%, 500% and some,  thousands of percent within a Cap system.  In other words,  while it is not written in the CBA, the most important thing for the players is Mother Nature.  The “nature” of owners that is,  and their complete inability to control themselves.  That’s what makes players wealthy, not the printed words within the CBA.

Players should not hate the owners who have made them millionaires.  They should instead prey that as a group they don’t ever change their “nature”.

See you at the rink.