Salary Arbitration...!?!?

[Makaveli]

The Sabres have the most players who are headed for arbitration with seven:

Mika Noronen, Jean-Pierre Dumont, Martin Biron, Brian Campbell, Jochen Hecht, Brad Brown, Daniel Briere and Rory Fitzpatrick.

ok I'm not really sure what that means so I searched around and found that in terms of free agency, Salary Arbitration is "a player aged 25 or older, or who has at least five years of NHL experience, qualifies for salary arbitration when his contract expires. Teams are not obliged to accept salary arbitration decisions. But if a team walks away from a salary arbitration award, the player may elect to become a Free Agent within seven days."

so does this mean that some of our best players may be free agents in a week? if we lose a lot of these guys (specially Briere) then we're boned.

[Dozerdog]

This is what hapens in salary arbitration-


The player comes in with a figure say 5 million a year for 5 years

The team comes in with a figure of 3 millioon for 5 years.

An independant arbitrator comes in and will pick one of the two figures, based on which one is more realistic and what is comparable to others in the league with similar stats.

If the team does not like the figure, they can continue to try and negotiate for a week, or let the guy go.

Arbitration ruined baseball and shot salaries sky high, because teams and players were forced to accept the arbitration. In the NHL, the team can walk away.

Joe Thornton is in arbitration this week with Boston. It's pretty rare to lose guys a team wants to keep.

[Ð]

Sometimes the agent's strategy is to force the team to let the player go.