NHL saves itself....

I normaly rant about some very random stuff. Today it is about the NHL.

Yesterday Ilya Kovalchuk signed a whopping 17 year contract with the New Jersey devils. This contract would have him playing til he was 44 and the last 5 years of the contract were basically at league minimum.

The NHL stepped in and rejected the contract due to "Salary Cap circumvention". Thus the NHL is stepping in and trying to save itself from well itself.

I have no problem with players going out and trying to get the most money for the most number of years that they possibly can but the GM's, Owners and the NHL really need to set up better rules to save themselves from being stupid. The salary cap was put in place to prevent GM's from signing tons of players for stupid salaries and thus forcing small market teams to fold as they wouldn't be able to compete. The GM's however have found a way around this by signing players to ridiculous long term contracts with the final years at extremely low salaries in order to drop the cap hit down and fit them in to the team.

My theory if the NHL really wants to save itself from these GM's it has to setup a couple new clauses in the CBA (the players would probably reject this).

1) No contract can be longer than 5-7 years and the cap hit is averaged over the largest 3 years of the contract.
2) No player can make more than 12% of the salary cap. This would prevent teams from over paying for players.
3) Put in that agents make a flat rate paid by the teams for every player they sign, not a precentage. agents will then try and get as many clients as possible signed not focusing on getting the biggest contract to get paid the most.

It should be a pretty simple break down for GM's in todays NHL. 3rd and 4th line players should not be making more than 2-3 million a year, 2nd line players should be making max 5 mill a season and your top 3 should be making no more than 7 million a season. The problem is GM's are tasked at making their team the best and have to answer to the owner and the fans that are screaming for top players. With this pressure GM's will always try to sign them and pay bigger bucks to get the coveted free agents. The NHL must step in to prevent the players from holding the GM's over the barrell and prevent the GM's from hurting the system.