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Boy, Hampus Lindholm got screwed (Trending Topics)

Getty Images
Getty Images

The thing with the NHL’s current CBA is that we know it’s not fair to the players. The last three labor stoppages were lockouts driven by owner greed, and all the leverage players might have had — or at least should have — has been sapped by the league over a period of two decades.

The way this manifests itself most plainly is for the League’s youngest players. In almost every case these days, even the highest-level young players in the game simply cannot get paid what they should be, or would be on the open market. This is due in large part to the fact that the general managers in the league long ago assented to an unspoken rule: Don’t sign each other’s restricted free agents.

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The reason why they do this is obvious: While they might be able to improve their teams by poaching a Ryan O’Reilly or Shea Weber — just to name the last guys to actually sign an offer sheet — the inflationary nature of the salaries needed to attract those players is the only deterrent needed. Because if you start giving every player coming out of an RFA deal what they would get as UFAs, the whole salary cap system as it’s currently constituted breaks down.

It’s also worth noting that general managers therefore have a vested interest in overstating the value to a given organization of a mid- or late first-round pick. The idea that you shouldn’t give up one, two, or even four of them to acquire a game-breaking talent is ludicrous because the odds any of those picks individually or collectively get you the kind of value elite talent does are quite low.

Which is why it’s dumb, but not surprising, that we got to late October and no one made an attractive enough offer to lure Anaheim Ducks defenseman Hampus Lindholm onto their blue line. Pretty much everyone needs defensemen. They will pay through the nose to sign deeply mediocre ones, or those with holes in their games, every July 1 without fail. Name a defenseman signed this summer. The very best one you can think of. Lindholm is better than him. Top-10 defenseman in the league, maybe even a little better than that. And he’s 6-foot-3. And he’s 22. And apparently you could have gotten him for something like $6 million AAV.

Jay Bouwmeester makes more than Lindholm. So does Brooks Orpik. Dan Girardi. Marc Staal. Andrei Markov. Toby Enstrom. Alex Goligoski (hey, he just signed this summer!). They are all, to one degree or another, significantly worse than Lindholm. Now, obviously, this is because all those guys signed as UFAs and not RFAs. You get to sign RFAs for cheaper. Doesn’t make any sense that you should. But you do. So before we start talking about “just buying UFA years” — Anaheim got him to give up two years of UFA status even with this low-ball deal — we need to understand that fundamentally this does not make sense.

The reason the Ducks even had to get to this point with Lindholm was that they couldn’t sign him. Adding him at a deal even half of what he’s worth in terms of on-ice success would have put them over the cap. In effect, his options were “take a bridge deal and hope to cash in later” or “sit out and hope you can apply pressure to the team with your absence.” Neither are preferable to the player, because the effect in both situations is not to Lindholm’s benefit. Taking a bridge deal really only helps his team keep the band together, and sitting out costs him money. Fortunately for him — to some extent — the ploy worked because he got a long-term deal out of it. But he undervalued himself significantly.

Think about why the Ducks were in this fix. How about almost $7 million to Ryan Kesler? How about $4 million to Kevin Bieksa (plus a no-move and on a 35-plus contract)? How about $3.25 million to Clayton Stoner? How about $4.15 million for Jonathan Bernier? And this is for a budget team. Bad contracts are always going to be a problem to some extent, but if Bob Murray is valuing Bieksa and Stoner, as UFAs, in that price range then Lindholm should be worth the GDP of a mid-sized Eastern European country. But because he’s an RFA, he doesn’t get to earn what he’s actually worth.

You’re “worth” what the market says you are, of course. And as far as we know, Lindholm had just one bidder for his services (relating back to the unspoken rule mentioned above). But we can look at similar defensemen and what they got from their teams. Buffalo gave Rasmus Ristolainen, who isn’t nearly as good as Lindholm, the same term and more money. Seth Jones is better than Ristolainen and is on the same contract. Morgan Rielly is in the same ballpark. None are as good as Lindholm, who took less money than he deserves because the system bends toward veterans, and Anaheim has a lot more of them to worry about than the teams that gave out similar contracts.

The reason guys entering their second contracts in particular get screwed in these negotiations is that it keeps costs down in a cap system. Obviously. Doesn’t keep them down as much as GMs would like, but if they can get a max number built into the next CBA for second contracts, they’ll do it in a second. Brian Burke has been talking about it on some level for years. The inflationary nature of modern second contracts and so on. He was so pissed Edmonton breached the Old Boys Club code that he wanted to rent a barn and have a fist fight about it. Because god forbid anyone do what Aaron Ekblad did and make what he’s actually worth before he’s allowed to hit the open market.

Professional sports’ labor practices are restrictive by nature, but in the NHL it’s really troubling because of where the game is heading. We know now that a player’s peak performance years are pretty much over by the time he gets to UFA. Meanwhile, the earliest you hit UFA status is 25 — and very few players start the clock as 18-year-olds to begin with — so now GMs theoretically come into UFA negotiations armed with the knowledge that they’re paying for, say, 90 percent of a player’s best performances, and that number is falling every subsequent year added onto the contract.

By the time, say, Connor McDavid is unrestricted, how smart will GMs be when it comes to this kind of negotiation point? Guys will likely be asked to take less than they’re worth on their second contracts (that’s if it’s not capped already ha ha ha) for the good of the team, only to find that when they’re UFAs and ready to earn some money, they hear, “Well, sorry, but you’re declining now, so we can’t give you what you’re worth now.”

When a player’s prime was thought to be his late 20s and early 30s, that kind of outlook made sense for players and teams alike. With the knowledge that peaks are as much as seven years earlier than previously thought, it no longer makes sense that guys should wait to get paid. At least, not for the players.

To that end it’s a bit of a shell game, if we’re being honest. Keep your eye on the big payday! And you never find it. Not to the extent you should, at least. Because when you bring up this kind of thing, the answer is always, “Well Lindholm got $32.5 million. That’s a lot of money.” And of course it is. More than anyone reading this will make in their lifetimes. But that’s: a) not a lot of money over six years to someone who owns even a broke NHL team, and b) about 75 percent of he’s worth.

Honestly, because these conditions and many other anti-player rules are in place, the NHLPA shouldn’t wait for the owners to lock them out next time around. The should strike. Strike for the whole season if they have to. Because the disparity between high-paid players and low-paid players is only going to widen; teams will take care of their stars and rely on low-paid filler for the bottom of their rosters.

Guys like Lindholm won’t be affected because they’re great, but middle-class guys around 29 or 30 will find it difficult to get a job in the league, and they’ll have to go to the KHL. Teams just won’t have it in the budget to give a good 28-year-old two years at $4.5 million per because stars get paid $11 million-plus against the cap. That’s just how it’ll go. Especially if the owners succeed in implementing a second-deal max.

Right now it’s a weird mishmash of great young players not getting paid and not-great veterans still reaping the benefits they fought for in past lockouts. Tough to blame them for taking the money after going through two separate owner-imposed work stoppages, plus salary rollbacks. Oh yeah, and also entry-level contracts and the previous, more onerous “second contracts.”

The fact that executives spend time complaining about players being paid roughly their real market value tells you plenty about the league-wide opinion of NHL players’ labor rights in their first seven years of NHL eligibility.

The writing is on the wall for Jacob Trouba here: “You also will be broken.” And with Winnipeg and Jacob Trouba, it’s not even a cap issue; they just don’t want to give him what he deserves in terms of money and role. And they won’t have to until he’s past his prime.

Ryan Lambert is a Puck Daddy columnist. His email is here and his Twitter is here.

All stats via Corsica unless otherwise stated.