The NHL would like to get rid of long-term contracts like the ones that Zach Parise and Ryan Suter signed this summer with the Minnesota Wild.
Parise and Suter were the two headliners of the free-agent signing season. The Wild hit a couple of home runs when they signed both stars.
That's not the problem, according to the NHL. The issue is the length of those contracts.
Both players signed 13-year, $98 million contracts. The NHL does not want its teams to offer contracts longer than five years.
It wants a five-year term limit to be included in the Collective Bargaining Agreement that the two sides are currently talking about.
They are talking about it because direct negotiations between the two sides have been stalled since the NHL rejected an NHL Players' Association counteroffer Oct. 18 (actually, three counteroffers were turned down).
When teams have issued long multi-year deals, they do this to reduce the cap hit of the contracts. When the $98 million is spread over 13 years, the Wild takes a salary hit of $7.5 million per year. In the early years of the contract, both Parise and Suter are each schedul ...
Read Full Article at Bleacher Report - NHL
Article written by Steve Silverman
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