New York Rangers: The NHL needs a player empowerment movement

The NHL lags behind the three other professional sports leagues in the United States in terms of player empowerment. For the league to reach the next level of access and interest, it must put the players at the forefront.

It’s been a slow burn this decade, but the NBA is on pace to pass the NFL in popularity within the next 20 years. As the league’s players became big enough to transcend the very idea of a team, it was also accompanied with surging popularity. People don’t root for the teams anymore, they root for Kyrie Irving or LeBron James.

Granted, the NHL lacks a James like figure to lead a player’s revolution. However, far too often during the course of collective bargaining in the player’s association’s history, it was too willing to curtail to the owners. It’s not exactly a coincidence that the NHL has the most regressive salary structure and average lowest salary of the four leagues in North America.

The current NHL landscape is very top heavy with just a few teams seriously in contention to win a Stanley Cup and it is partly due to the salary system. The players’ wages are artificially depressed through rules and not what they would command on the open market.

With a lockout looming following the 2019-2020 season in which the owners are able to opt out on September 1st of 2019, there are going to be battle lines drawn. If the NHL ever hopes to push towards the NBA or even MLB in terms of popularity, it will require a face of the league like Auston Matthews or Conor McDavid to draw a line in the sand and stick up for player rights.

It took James in the NBA taking his career into his own hands for the league to jump to the next level of public consciousness. As players develop into brands, it allows for a greater demand for the product.

Restricted free agency and Offer sheets

The single biggest difficulty facing the players as the league is currently constructed is the restricted free agency and offer sheet system. The fact that a player cannot reach unrestricted free agency until age 27 or they’ve played eight years in the league is utter insanity. With a team holding a player’s rights for ten years, they are forced to accept below market value contracts.

While designed to keep young players with the team that drafts them for a considerable period of time, it leads to toxic situations in which highly regarded draft picks cannot wait to leave a bad situation but are kept like property. Restricted free agency solely exists at the benefit of small market teams that have owners who do not want to pay the market value for deals.

In addition to the regressive nature of restricted free agency, there is also the matter of offer sheets. There’s a reason that the last one offered occurred back in 2013 when the St. Louis Blues matched a two year $5 million dollar offer to then restricted free agent center Ryan O’Reilly.

At that cost, the Calgary Flames, who made the offer, would have had to give St. Louis a first and third-round pick. As the average annual deal of the contract increases, the compensation required also goes up. With an offer of more than $8.1 million, the offering team must compensate in the other team in the form of two firsts, a second and third-round pick.

If the NHL had a model similar to the NBA in which a team just had to make a contract offer without any attached compensation it would allow the player to make more and for the free agent market to be more reflective of player talent.

Take the William Nylander situation from this past fall for example. Under the NBA’s rules, the New York Rangers or any number of teams could have offered a one or two year deal at a significant markup than what the Toronto Maple Leafs could afford to match. This would give the league’s talent more access to fair compensation.

Front loading contracts and caps

Part of the last CBA that was agreed to back in 2013 following that lockout was a restriction on backloading a contract. In fact, teams with players on such a deal were penalized following the end of the lockout. The textbook example was Ilya Kovalchuk’s ten year $100 million dollar contract which the New Jersey Devils were saddled with once the Russian jumped ship to the KHL.

The latest measure that big market teams are taking is front-loading contracts in terms of when salary is due. In Matthews’ extension with the Maple Leafs, 93 percent of his salary is in the form of signing bonuses which are due in a lump sum on July 1st of each year instead of being included in the base salary.

This means that Matthews will get several lump sum payments over the life of his contract. The other seven percent will be paid out as regular base salary meaning during the course of the season on a bi-weekly basis.

Teams that can afford to pay this lump sum up front do so because although it’s the same overall contract value it may entice the player slightly more. Getting a deposit for $15 million on July 1st is a pretty tantalizing offer for a player coming off of a restricted free agent contract.

However, as Larry Brooks of the New York Post reported:

"In the wake of the Matthews signing, calls have been renewed for the NHL to place a cap on the amount/percentage of bonuses within contracts, perhaps at 25 or 50 percent, on top of all of the other restrictive caps within the league’s unyielding system. It would be no surprise to see the league include this in its proposal for a new CBA."

This is yet another punitive measure designed to keep teams with stingy ownership in contention through artificial wage depression. The owners crying poverty at every collective bargaining negotiation while reigning in money from the team and from revenue sharing.

If anything, the teams should be forced to contribute more to the revenue sharing pot instead of passing the bill onto the players.

Final thoughts

For the sake of the NHL, it’s time that the players were put at the forefront. If the league genuinely wants to compete with the others in North America for more viewers, it needs to take lessons. There’s a reason that the NBA and NFL dominate media coverage in North America, it’s players are at the forefront and have agency over their careers.

McDavid agreeing to the largest extension in the league two years ago was a blip on the radar at least in part because of the drastic difference in salary. McDavid’s NHL leading $12.5 million per year is comparable to a back of the rotation pitcher in baseball, a rotation player in basketball and an average wide receiver in football.

Simply put, the salary structure hamstrings the league and holds it back from reaching its true potential. It’s the time that the players be put first and treated like the amazing talents they are. Instead of bemoaning their bloated salaries for causing lockouts, recognize that greedy owners are the ones preventing the games.

The owners are the ones who hire incompetent general managers or team president’s that doll out terrible contracts like candy. It’s not a player’s fault that they were offered life-changing money by an organization that misvalued their talent.

Come the summer of 2020, remember how far the NHL’s players assosciation trails the other professional leagues if things do in fact lead to a lockout. It’s time that the owners recognize that without the players, the sport cannot exist.