NHLPA exec Donald Fehr on hot topics of salary cap, offer sheets and more

Don Fehr stepped out of the Gallery Bistro & Grill at the Glen Abbey Golf Club and into the late June sunshine. He squinted and tried moving left to right a few times to be able to better address the dozen or so reporters gathered at the NHLPA’s annual golf tournament. It was no use, the sun was too persistent.

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“It doesn’t matter,” said Fehr, the executive director of the NHLPA.

What did matter on Thursday was the issue of possible offer sheets for a crop of young, talented RFAs, a salary cap which did not go up as much as expected last week and the implications for the league and its players.

“What’s on your mind?” Fehr asked reporters, rather gingerly.

As free agency looms and the focus switches to off-ice matters around the league, Fehr and a handful of NHL players gathered for the annual golf tournament shared their thoughts on some of the hot button topics in the NHL today:

Salary cap implications

On Saturday following the conclusion of the 2019 NHL Entry Draft, the NHL and NHLPA announced that the salary cap for the 2019-20 season would be $81.5 million. The announcement came much later than anticipated.

The salary cap for the 2018-19 season was $79.5 million.

“Hopefully there will be enough fluidity in the system and it’ll work well,” Fehr said of his impressions of next season’s salary cap. “But setting the cap on an ongoing basis is a difficult proposition. Especially in an era in which we’ve had high escrow. And so we’ll see.”

Fehr said that once the league and the NHLPA enter into significant bargaining, the aforementioned issue of determining the salary cap on an ongoing basis will certainly come up.

“It’s intimately related to the escrow issue,” said Fehr.

The current collective bargaining agreement between the NHL and NHLPA deems that the league’s owners and players share hockey-related revenue with a 50-50 split. If you’re in need of a primer on escrow, a tool used to ensure that split is adhered to with relation to player salaries, Jonathan Willis’s excellent piece on the subject explains it very well.

So could Fehr envision a flat salary cap being used to eliminate escrow?

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“There are a lot of things you can say which amount to, let’s artificially manipulate the salary structure so that we can solve the escrow problems without the owners making any contribution at all to doing that,” said Fehr. “That strikes me as reasonably unlikely.”

Fehr would go on to say that there were a number of things that could be done to recalculate hockey related revenue and therefore affect escrow. One option includes examining what the pot of hockey related revenue is and then in addition, exacting some limits on the exchange rate between American and Canadian dollars.

“Or what you could do, and I suspect this is what some of the owners are going to suggest is just lower the cap,” said Fehr. “And then get you get rid of escrow.”

Perhaps a future without a hard salary cap?

Don’t hold your breath.

“I lived without a cap for a long, long time,” said Fehr, who previously served as executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association. “In a perfect world, that’s what you would like. Obviously that is not something the NHL owners have communicated an interest in. And so you have to work through. You have to bargain in good faith but you have to bargain with the other side.”

Fehr would go on to say that while the player’s association and the league have had informal discussions regarding a CBA extension, they haven’t yet gotten to formal proposals. So when might that happen?

“Ask me about August 15th, I’ll have a better idea,” said Fehr.

Offer sheets for young RFAs

The topic of offer sheets has been discussed heavily in Toronto, where 22-year-old star winger and restricted free agent Mitch Marner’s future remains a priority for Leafs GM Kyle Dubas.

But offer sheet discussion is in no way confined to Toronto.

Across the league, some of hockey’s best young players including Colorado Avalanche forward Mikko Rantanen and Tampa Bay Lightning forward Brayden Point are part of an unusually large and exceptionally talented RFA class. The window for RFAs to sign offer sheets, now one of the most hotly contested elements of player contracts, is officially open, and the question was put to Fehr as to why there has not been an offer sheet in the NHL for six years now.

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“What has always been interesting to me is this: The owners have a desire to limit negotiating every way they can because they believe accurately that it holds salaries down,” said Fehr. “And so what you have is a series of provisions built into the agreement, mostly compensation and the right of first refusal which effectively inhibit it.”

So could this be the summer when an offer sheet is signed, which could begin to change the way players treat upcoming contracts with the teams that draft them?

New Jersey Devils forward Taylor Hall, who is entering the final year of a very reasonable seven-year, $42 million contract, was asked on Thursday about whether the landscape of contracts for NHL players has changed after John Tavares signed with the Leafs as an unrestricted free agent last summer.

“Yeah I mean, you’re starting to see whether there’s offer sheets or not,” said Hall. “You’re starting to see players want to, I don’t know if it’s get paid what they’re worth but see what’s out there and what the other 30 teams have to offer. That’s in the players’ rights. That’s what we fought for in negotiations and all that. So if you have time, it’s wise to take it and make the right decisions. John (Tavares) did something that really hasn’t been done before. He made a decision for himself and was definitely aware of the ramifications in Long Island and all that. I think he was pretty happy about that. There’s definitely a changing landscape. There’s always going to be different stuff that happens in the course of a season. You’re starting to see players have a little more of a voice.”

Leafs forward William Nylander was also on hand for the golf tournament. Nylander is a former RFA who missed 27 games last season while negotiating his second NHL contract but insisted he hadn’t thought about the lack of offer sheets around the league for RFAs.

“Every player just wants the deal they deserve,” said Nylander.

Colorado Avalanche forward Gabriel Landeskog also addressed this current RFA class, which includes his teammate Mikko Rantanen.

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“Good for them,” said Landeskog. “For Mikko (Rantanen), he’s earned everything he’s gotten. I’m sure they’re going to come to a good conclusion and settle on something really good for both parties.”

Given the talent available in this RFA class, Fehr was asked what a possible lack of offer sheets would say about the current system in place for RFAs.

“It says that the system is effectively one which does not produce it,” said Fehr. “But you have to understand that’s what the owners want. Nobody wants competition for their younger star players.”

The next World Cup of Hockey? 

The success of the 2016 World Cup of Hockey in lieu of the Olympics only whetted fan appetite for another international best-on-best tournament. Fehr said that “in a perfect world,” the next time fans could see a World Cup of Hockey would be “perhaps as soon as February 2021 or September 2022. The next logical time would be February 2022.”

The 2016 World Cup of Hockey took place in Toronto, 12 years after the previous iteration of the tournament was also held in Toronto. Canada won the 2016 tournament by beating Team Europe 2-0 in a best-of-three final.

Fehr was sporting a white 2016 World Cup of Hockey polo shirt for the day, though he insists that wasn’t by design.

“It was clean,” Fehr said with a smile. “I’m a bachelor up here (in Toronto). You do what you can.”

(Photo: Glenn James/NHLI via Getty Images)

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