Trending Topics is a column that looks at the week in hockey, occasionally according to Twitter. If you’re only going to comment to say how stupid Twitter is, why not just go have a good cry for the slow, sad death of your dear internet instead?
You can say that a lot of things were the cause of the lockout and not be wrong. As Gary Bettman says, the lack of control over things like jet fuel have certainly cut into owners’ pocketbooks. As have increasing player costs. As has owners’ base avarice. As has runaway spending by GMs. As have a wide variety of other factors.
But of those, player costs and GMs’ willingness to spend their owners’ money are the two that are most inexorably linked.
Competition for players, specifically top players, has become so fierce that GMs are willing to spend anything and everything they can to acquire them. Witness the contracts collected by Ryan Suter, Zach Parise and Shea Weber this summer, when teams went to considerable lengths to woo and eventually sign them, and did so using what should be considered the kind of spirit-of-the-thing cap circumvention that Gary Bettman slapped the Devils for a few years back.
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