The free agent frenzy began last Friday for the National Hockey League and as players have begun to sign with teams, the annual exercise in capitalism is enough to put an ear-to-ear grin on Gordon Gekko's face.
A lot of people say athletes are overpaid. After all, why should they receive grotesque paycheques for playing a game, while the rest of us work everyday scrounging around with our fellow bottom feeders. I'm not one of those people. While I do scrounge around with my fellow bottom feeders, I don't think athletes are overpaid.
If there is anyone to blame for exorbitant sports salaries, it's the people like you and me who push those dollars higher.
Is a $60 million-over-nine-year contract a lot? Well, it's a lot of money, but if Brad Richards asks for that contract and the owner says OK, that's what he is worth. The team has to look at what they can afford and if they can afford that contract, and are willing to pay for it, then good on Richards.
With high-priced elite athletes getting so much, however, many of the "character" players make considerably less. The disparity between the low-end salary and high-end is pretty wide. The highest-paid players in the NHL are making roughly 20 times what the lowest paid are getting.
But nobody really cares because they are all still making $500,000 per year.
These athletes are worth these dollars because we, as consumers, will buy seats to the games, watch them on TV and buy lots of what the advertisers are selling. The free market has a way of figuring out what everybody is worth, whether in sports or business or anywhere else.
The only way to see if an athlete is getting paid too much is to look at what a comparable player in the league is making, and there are a lot of variables there. Looking at offensive production isn't always enough. In fact, it rarely is.
To say Andrew Ladd doesn't deserve his $4.5 million a year contract but Erik Cole does, you really have to look at a lot of information. Even age is a big factor. Maybe Ladd doesn't have all the upside Cole did in his heyday, but Ladd is 25 and entering his prime, while Cole is 32 and is now exiting his and entering his golden years of professional hockey.
It's only individual sports like golf where the athletes truly make what they earn. In golf, you either are the best on the course and make a big pay day that week, or you miss the cut and are paying for that cheap hotel and all the travel expenses to the next event yourself. Well, there's always sponsorship.
In golf, players don't go to the tour and say, "I'm ranked top-10 on the tour, I want top-10 dollars." If you are ranked 217th and place seventh in a tournament, you make seventh place money, while the No. 1 ranked golfer who placed eighth makes eighth place money that week. That could be the only pay day all year for that guy ranked 217th, so I'd say he's earned it.
