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Red Wings fans got some disappointing news as
Trey Augustine opted for a 3rd year at MSU. More than disappointment, for some of us the CBA clock is ticking. An NCAA player can’t sign their ELC and if they spend 4 years in school, the team loses the player rights. This is one of the rules that baffles me personally. You punish a player who may geniunely want to get a degree, and you punish a team for drafting someone and not signing them to avoid the situation. Now that NCAA players can get paid, it gets more complicated. Add tampering, a nightmare could be brewing.
Obviously, this is the rule yours truly would address. Allow for a limited number of modified collegiate ELC contracts that let the team pay an annual bonus each year that would count as NIL for the player and allow the team to retain their rights. Seems easy enough. Limit it to one per year, max of 4 or 5 on the books and they convert to a revised ELC depending on how long they stay in school. Unfortunately, agents and by proxy players would likely fight this tooth and nail.
Here are the options of issues that seem to come up continually:
1 - Post TDL miracle healings -
head to puckpedia and you can see in red all the teams that are over the cap. We’ve seen multiple teams bring in reinforcements when a valuable player goes down to see the cap lifted after the TDL and in televangelist style the crutches are thrown into the air. A simple tool would be a carry over penalty for the next season. You went 5m over? You pay a percentage of that in next year’s salary cap (depending on how far the team goes in the playoffs).
2 - every team plays every team. There is already talk of eliminating a portion of this for next season with the number of back to back games being played to facilitate 3+ weeks off with the Olympics and an all star weekend. The pushback comes from teams that might not get McDavid or Matthews in the building. Those players print money when they visit a building. Still, the west coast swing for Detroit in particular seems to be an unnecessary portion of the schedule. A lot fewer of you tune in when the game starts at 10.
3 - in season tournaments - this will raise some fur. For a 2nd straight year most of the league will spend multiple weeks off while the top players get picked for a tournament. Slapping a 2 to 4 week commitment that compresses the regular season just seems like a bad idea. The 4 nations had 2 huge games but were they worth it? Players want to go to the Olympics, but is it the best thing for the league?
4 - this is the one that will make the most people mad. Readjust the revenue sharing and stop paying teams that overspend every year for more than 3 years. The easiest recent example would be the coyotes playing in a 5k capacity stadium. We may never know exactly how much revenue was dumped into life support before finally moving the team to Utah but the debt was rumored to be near the 2B mark. The league subsidized an owner who refused to make good on the lease of an arena.
Let me know your thoughts. There is plenty to be fixed. On the player’s side, agents are pushing for fewer rounds in the drafts to keep teams from retaining a player’s rights when they may have no intention of signing them. It’s not a clean and easy fix and there will always be “the other side”. If you could, what would you change?
Detroit Red Wings Blogger • 
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