from Ron MacLean of Hometown Hockey,

I’m willing to bet that two thirds of the NHL players with no-trade or no-movement clauses in their contracts do not list Canadian teams on their roll of approved trade locations. This is a huge problem for teams in Canada trying to build a winner.

There are three routes to a rebuild: draft, free agency and trades. In the current collective bargaining agreement, for all its owner-friendly elements, players control two of the three. I’m happy for the players—they ought to be paid equal or more salary than whatever the next best offer for their services would be. That, and the ability to sell tickets, would establish their market value.

But the players did not stay in the fight for those rights in their 2005 CBA negotiating loss to management, and so their last levers of control are the rights to push for no-trade and no-movement clauses or to use free agency at some point in their career to control where they play—and that’s a major stumbling block for the Canadian franchises.

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