from Larry Brooks of the New York Post,

There they go again.

The owners, management people, compliant messengers in my business, there they go again throwing around the term “loophole” to define a business practice permissible under the collective bargaining agreement used by wealthy team ownership to sign a player.

There they went again, whining when the Maple Leafs’ five-year, $58.17 million second contract to Auston Matthews featured $54.52 million in bonuses, or 93.725 percent of the total. And this just months after Toronto brought home 2018 free agent John Tavares with a seven-year, $77 million contract containing $70.89 million in bonuses, or 92.06 percent of the sum.

In the wake of the Matthews signing, calls have been renewed for the NHL to place a cap on the amount/percentage of bonuses within contracts, perhaps at 25 or 50 percent, on top of all of the other restrictive caps within the league’s unyielding system. It would be no surprise to see the league include this in its proposal for a new CBA....

continued plus other topics like this...

So Mike Keenan was asked how he compares the current game to the one in 1994, and the guy with the moniker “Iron” as the first part of his nickname answered pretty much as you could infer. Political correctness has never been a big part of the coach’s résumé.

“Today’s players, to me, are not engaged in the game as much,” Keenan said at the Garden on Friday in advance of the Blueshirts’ 25-year Stanley Cup reunion. “It’s not as compelling, and maybe that’s part of what has transpired with the mentality of the new player coupled with the change in the rules....