Some of those contracts are definitely silly, but Duthie comments about the state of the league and the lockout are disingenuous or misinformed.  “We have a league that has already forgotten the trouble it was in just three years ago.” Individual contracts cannot start salary inflation the way they did before the lockout, because teams are restricted by the cap.  Each team can only spend within a specific band, above the floor and below the ceiling.  Even if every time spends to the cap or to the floor, the escrow fund exists to ensure that players as a whole earn a fairly constant percentage of league revenues.

“And we all ask ourselves what was that lockout for again?” The lockout was meant to create an even playing field between teams by removing the enormous salary differences between teams and instituting revenue sharing.  Since then, for those or other reasons, the league has been overtaken by ‘parity’.

“Just don’t blame the players this time.  They are entitled to get whatever the market bears.  And the market has gone goofy.  Again.” The players were never to blame and were always entitled to what teams were willing to pay them.  This was compounded under the previous CBA by the fact that players spent their most productive years as criminally underpaid restricted free agents.  So of course they looked for their payday when they finally got the chance.

Posted by Ryan from Toronto on 07/02/08 at 01:33 AM ET

Good point, Ryan!  It still rankles me, though, to see a guy like Campbell get 7.1 per year.  Not blaming the player here.  But just because you’ve got a few pretty good players available shouldn’t make their stock rise so much.  I mean, if I go looking for a ferrari and they’re sold out I am not going to but a lexus at ferrari prices.  Course this is the same organization that way overpaid for Khabibulin.  Go figure.

Posted by AndrewB from TN on 07/02/08 at 07:29 AM ET