from Michael Traikos of the National Post at Canoe,
The best players in the league today are also some of the youngest. Of the top five scorers, three (Toronto’s Auston Matthews, Colorado’s Mikko Rantanen and Carolina’s Sebastian Aho) are in the final year of their entry-level contracts. That doesn’t include Toronto’s Mitch Marner, Tampa Bay’s Brayden Point or Winnipeg’s Patrik Laine, whose deals also expire next summer.
How do you determine the market value for a player such as Vancouver’s Brock Boeser, who by the end of this season will be lucky to have played 150 games? What happens when a player and a team have differing views on his long-term potential? What if the team isn’t being fair?
“The fix is fairly simple,” Octagon Hockey agent Allan Walsh wrote Postmedia in a direct message on Friday. “Players coming out of entry-level should have arbitrations rights. The one dark year encourages these impasses. Give the players the ability to negotiate a comparable contract to the league-wide marketplace.”
Giving players arbitration rights a year earlier would prevent contract impasses, but not everyone is convinced the current rules put the players at a disadvantage.
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