Crosby Contract Good for Caps

Rest assured, this will be the only piece we ever post with the word "Crosby" and the phrase "good for Caps" (excepting extreme circumstances involving early retirement, the dissolving of the Penguins franchise, an unlikely trade, or a move from Mario Lemieux's house to Jaromir Jagr's). With that in mind, let’s look at the good fortune Washington reaps from Sid’s new 5-year, $45 million contract.

If Alex Ovechkin’s cryptic “it’s a little bit secret” response to questions about a contract extension (plus pure common sense) is to be interpreted to mean the Caps are in negotiations to extend his soon-to-be-expired (after this season) rookie contract, we can assume that both parties are looking at comparable contracts around the league. Before today, the only close benchmarks were the gratuitously overpaid Daniel Briere (8 yr./$52M), Chris Drury (5 yr./$35.25M), and Scott Gomez (7 yr./$51.5M).

While Briere’s contract may not be completely ludicrous (if you have a fetish for diminutive centers who specialize in doling out cheap spears while hiding in the comfortable shadow of a defenseman twice their size), the Rangers giving out $7 million+/year contracts to a pair of guys who didn’t top 70 points last season was at the very least a disturbing harbinger of future contracts (will the likes of David Vyborny, with his Gomez-like numbers, demand similar terms in future negotiations?). The Crosby Precedent, with it’s $9 million/year average, presumably puts a reasonable limit on individual player salaries in a way that the ever-rising NHL cap cannot.

With a comparable contract at last in place, the Capitals can safely offer Ovechkin a fair-market deal before he becomes a restricted free agent next summer. With the jilted Kevin Lowe’s ridiculous offer (since matched) to Thomas Vanek as a potential benchmark, RFAs may not be as unattainable to a deep-pocketed (or desperate) team as they used to be. It’s not hard to imagine the Rangers or a like-minded-and-financed team making an equally over-the-top offer to Ovechkin next July, which the Caps would then have to match (or lose their franchise player, then their already tenuous fanbase, then their franchise), to the likely detriment of the rest of the squad. The NHL “cap” on individual player salaries (no more than 20% of the total salary cap) is no protection against such a thing. With the team cap rising from $39 million in 05-06 to $50.3 million only two years later, it’s not hard to envision a “cap” of $11.5 million+ or more for individual players within a year or two. It’s a salary that our friends in New York, Philadelphia, Detroit, or Toronto would be more than happy to provide, probably with an insanely front-loaded contract.

In the end, Crosby may have saved the Caps a few million dollars over the next several seasons, enough to put another Viktor Kozlov or two on the roster. So thanks, Sid (also the only time such a phrase will appear), for restoring some relative form of sanity to the league. Too bad your submissive servant Commissioner can’t do the same.

Hands Off, Betttman, et al

While it's not exactly Washington-sports-related, DCO nevertheless would like to commend Yahoo! Sports writer Dan Wetzel for his excellent column today on the NHL playoffs. To summarize: he says don't mess with the overtime. Just because NBC broke away pre-overtime from the Sabres-Senators game in favor of the thrilling Preakness pre-race special, that doesn't mean it's time to start considering again ill-begotten "solutions" to the playoff overtime "problem". Would NBC have been more likely to stick with the game if the teams started overtime playing 4-on-4, or if they went to a shootout after an overtime or two? Doubtful. The lure of that pony money would still be there.

Four-on-four overtime is fine for the regular season. We can even grudgingly accept shootouts instead of hard-fought ties. But back off when it comes to the playoffs, even if the games stretch into the morning hours (which, as Wetzel points out, they don't do as often as some would have us believe). As a hockey fan and a Caps fan, and as a survivor of April 24, 1996, I truly hope Commissioner Gary Bettman does not continue to desperately grasp for the mass-media respect that hockey is never going to get by implementing such rules. Even though Petr Nedved ruined a perfectly mesmerizing game of hockey 11 years ago by scoring late in the fourth overtime, I would rather have seen the game as I had rather than seen it decided by the three best shooters on each team plus the goalies.

It's true what Wetzel wrote: every rush up the ice that night by the Penguins filled the arena (at least the portions not occupied by Pittsburgh fans) with tension, and every possession by the Caps brought the hope that it would be over (for the better) in a matter of seconds. Double those feelings on a power play for either side. That's a few dozen swings in emotion over the course of a 20-minute period. Exhausting to watch, and even more so to play? That's the game.

So thanks, Dan, for refuting Kara Yorio's overtime defeatist column from last month. One of her arguments actually, in retrospect, shows the foolishness of ever allowing the shootout to appear in the NHL, under the slippery slope category: "If the shootout is a good enough way to decide how teams get into the playoffs, then it should be a good enough way to decide who wins the games once they're there." We would argue: if it's a mediocre-to-bad idea in the regular season, it's an absolutely dreadful idea in the post-season.