No Alexei Yashin negotiation ever went smoothly. Players would routinely hold out, miss big chunks of the season, never get their acts together and, frequently, it created irreparable rifts with their organizations. It got so bad eventually, the NHL got it written into the CBA: a deal was a deal. Players had to play out their contracts; renegotiating a deal because you weren’t happy with it any more was not an option.

Pietrangelo’s negotiations are interesting because they mirror Drew Doughty’s with the Los Angeles Kings two years ago. Pietrangelo is from the same draft class as Doughty, but took two extra years to make it to the NHL. So while Doughty has five years under his belt, Pietrangelo has just three, meaning he is still in the entry-level system and doesn’t have rights to salary arbitration. It is the one time in the current agreement where the negotiating leverage belongs to the team.

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But it is an interesting and welcome phenomenon – how few of these disputes actually develop any more. Now, more than ever, the focus in September is on training camps and player performance, not salary negotiations and performance bonuses.

Continued