Let's get old: 5 NHL offseason things I miss from days of yore

Its mid-July.

Its too hot, my neighbor isnt keeping his lawn in shape, they dont make smart summer movies anymore and all these kids who are off school should be out doing something productive instead of staring at screens all day.

In related news, I am old.

How old? Old enough to have a bunch of opinions about things I miss from the ancient days.

And youre going to hear a few of them, because its time for the return of Lets Get Old, the column where I (blows out entire lumbar region by sneezing wrong) ...

ah, youll figure it out.

Advertisement To be clear, this isnt even the typical old man yells at cloud thing where I think things were better back then.

Ill fully acknowledge that the NHL and the sport of hockey have improved over the decades.

But that doesnt mean I cant miss stuff like faceoffs in random locations and officials climbing the glass , or baggy nets and big moments punctuated by flash photography .

Was it better back then? Not really, but also sort of, which is the type of confusion you should expect from an old man like me.

Today, were going to focus on the offseason.

Here are five things that my old and deteriorating sports fan brain misses about how things used to work.

I miss when we didnt care about salaries How it used to be: Believe it or not, kids, there was a time when we evaluated the moves our teams made based almost entirely on the quality of players moving in and out, without any thought to how much anyone was making.

Good players were good players, and if they made a little bit too much money, that was the owners problem.

In a lot of cases, we didnt even know who was signed for what length of time until youd just sort of hear in passing that a player you liked needed a new contract.

Then someone would sign somewhere, wed see the dollar amount and all agree that was too much, and that was it for the financial analysis.

Wed already moved on to thinking about how theyd fit into the lineup and which power-play unit theyd be on.

If youre really old, you remember a time when we didnt know any player salaries.

Up until the early 90s, player salaries were closely guarded information because owners realized that they could get away with paying less if nobody knew what their colleagues were making.

So youd hear that your favorite team had acquired a player, and you had absolutely no idea what that meant financially.

It wasnt even a consideration, as far as we were concerned.

Advertisement Why it changed: The NHLPA forced visibility on player salaries in the early 90s, which was when it became common to see dollar signs showing up in transaction stories.

Player salaries started to feel more important as the 90s went on and some teams struggled financially, since you knew there were certain numbers teams like the New York Rangers and Detroit Red Wings could pay that the Edmonton Oilers or Hartford Whalers couldnt.

But the big change is obviously the arrival of the salary cap in 2005.

Once there was a hard cap, salaries went from secondary information at best to the most important thing you could know about a new player.

Why I miss it: It was just simpler, you know? And I say that as someone who doesnt hate having a salary cap, and doesnt even mind the way its rewired our hockey fan brains.

Fitting the pieces under a hard cap adds an element of strategy that can be more interesting than just watching the same few teams acquire every veteran star.

But weve all been in the situation where we find ourselves recoiling when a player we love just got too much money and term, because now thats a lot more than an owner issue.

In todays NHL, a good player with a bad contract isnt a good player.

That makes sense.

But part of me misses the days when good players were good and that was the end of it, and wed leave the rest up to their accountants.

I miss when acquiring old players was fine How it used to be: Your team would sign a guy that youd been watching on other teams for a decade.

In passing, it would be briefly mentioned that hes 33.

And your only thought would be Cool, its going to be fun to watch that guy play for my team, instead of Hes so old, I wonder if he makes it to training camp.

Why it changed: A few things happened.

First, the game got faster, tilting the balance toward younger players.

Second, and relatedly, analytics got better, which both reinforced the shift toward youth and provided pretty compelling evidence against the but his veteran smarts! counterpoints.

And third, the cap made contract term a scary thing, especially for veterans.

Advertisement A few decades ago, if your team signed an old guy who ended up being cooked, it was a disappointment, but it didnt ruin your teams payroll for years to come.

And you at least got to be happy about it on signing day, instead of immediately having someone lecture you that nobody with grey hair in their beard can ever be useful because only 21-year-olds can be good at hockey anymore.

Why I miss it: Partly because Im also old, and I dont like being reminded that all sports are now this tweet .

But more than that, its just cool when a big-name player winds up on your team.

Seeing a star in your teams uniform is neat.

But in a league where teams control most players through the age of 27 or so, there isnt much room for finding a star in his prime.

It was easier back when we thought a prime took you through your early 30s, even if we were probably wrong then and would definitely be wrong now.

I miss when youd find out about a big move from another person How it used to be: When something happened, you didnt have a phone in your pocket to ping you right away.

There werent many TVs tuned to sports coverage, and even those channels didnt have tickers running at all times.

It all added up to frequent situations where something important broke and you just wouldnt know about it maybe even for hours at a time.

And when you did find out, theres a good chance it was a friend or a family member or even some random stranger on a subway whod break the news to you.

That was cool.

Why it changed: Because sports coverage is way better now.

As a fan, Id much rather live in todays world, where news breaks right away and we get instant analysis, theoretically from smart people.

I wouldnt want to go back to the days when you just floated through your sports fan life with next to no idea of whether anything important was happening.

Except ...

well, obviously todays world of constant coverage can get to be a little much, right? I like finding out about news when it happens, but there are times when it feels like trying to sip from a firehose.

I realize Im the last person in the last place who should be complaining about what the online world did to sports coverage, but when it comes to knowing things, maybe Pete Holmes was right .

Why I miss it: I remember my dad coming home from work one day and asking if Id heard about the Leafs new coach.

It was Pat Burns, which was surprising given that hed been the Habs coach as recently as that morning.

It turns out there had been an entire day of drama, with Burns resigning in Montreal and then showing up later that afternoon in Toronto for a surprise press conference.

Its the kind of day that we look back on now and make jokes about it breaking Twitter, which it absolutely would have.

Advertisement But back then, I missed all of it, even though I was a sports-obsessed kid who wanted to know everything I could about my favorite teams.

I just hadnt heard.

So my dad told me, and we immediately launched into one of those sports fan debates about the move.

Those debates are still around, but they were different when everyone involved hadnt already seen a half-dozen takes establishing what they were supposed to think.

Even more fun than hearing about a move from somebody was getting to be the one who told somebody.

When was the last time you did that without the other person saying they already knew? You still get that moment occasionally, but it used to be the norm.

OK, this is getting a little too wistful.

Lets lock in on a specific thing we could actually bring back.

I miss when offer sheets meant forced player trades How it used to be: Back in the 1980s and 1990s, the NHL already had the concept of the offer sheet.

But for a while, instead of the salary-based draft pick compensation charts we all know and love today, the league did things differently.

If a team signed an offer sheet with one of your players and you didnt match, both sides would have to propose a player-based trade, with an arbitrator picking one or the other.

Its how we got trades like Scott Stevens for Brendan Shanahan .

Ill admit St.

Louis Blues fans may not enjoy that example, but the rest of us can agree a forced blockbuster like that kind of rules.

Why it changed: Youve seen how NHL GMs react to making a trade they actually want to make, so you can imagine how theyd handle being pushed into one.

By the time the cap era started, the NHL had already ditched the mandatory trades and gone to something closer to the system were used to today.

Why I miss it: It just added a fascinating element to offseason maneuvering.

If you were thinking of using an offer sheet, you had to be careful because you could end up losing the exchange, like the Blues did with Stevens.

But it also made offer sheets more likely to work, exactly because the compensation was theoretically guaranteed to be something worthwhile.

Advertisement And best of all, wed get to hear about both offers, meaning you basically had a situation where there were two trades for the same player on the table, and one had to go through.

For example, in the Stevens/Shanahan swap, the Blues offer had been Curtis Joseph and Rod BrindAmour, two kids just entering their prime.

Hows that for a hockey what if? I definitely do not miss when a few stars held out every year How it used to be: The offseason would play out, and youd occasionally hear rumors about various star players being unhappy with their contracts.

You didnt pay much attention because it was the summer and most of that stuff ended up getting worked out before training camp.

But then September would arrive, and youd hear that a couple of those situations were still lingering.

Then youd read about concern over whether the player would report to camp.

And then, in at least one or two spots around the league, youd hear the dreaded h-word: Holdout.

For you kids out there, Ill explain: A holdout was when a player who had a valid contract just decided they didnt want to play under it.

So they just ...

wouldnt.

Theyd refuse to show up to training camp, staying away until their team agreed to rip up their deal and give them a new one.

Sometimes, even that wasnt enough, and the relationship would be so badly damaged that the player would insist on being traded.

Often, theyd end up missing weeks or even months of the season, sitting at home until a trade happened.

In rare cases, they might miss the entire season.

Try to imagine that happening today, with Quinn Hughes or Nikita Kucherov or Brady Tkachuk or whoever else deciding that theyre underpaid on their existing contract and/or didnt want to play for their team anymore, even if it meant sitting out a huge chunk of a season in their prime.

It would be a jaw-dropping story, one that would have fans around the league feeling furious or fascinated or both.

But this used to happen all the time in the 1990s, with star players like Pavel Bure, Paul Coffey, Alexei Yashin, Eric Lindros, Mike Peca or Steve Larmer all ultimately forcing trades.

And thats not counting guys like Sergei Fedorov or Scott Niedermayer, who went well into the season without any contract at all, or names like Mark Messier who threatened to stay home before ultimately getting new deals, or even guys like Doug Gilmour whod walk out on their teams in the middle of a season .

Why it changed: Among other seismic changes, the 2004 CBA removed any ability to renegotiate an active contract.

That all but eliminated the impetus behind most true holdouts, and these days, when you hear the word, its typically being misapplied to rare RFA cases like Jacob Trouba or William Nylander, where a player goes into the season without any deal at all in place.

(Those guys arent technically holding out, because they dont have contracts to hold out from.) Why I miss it: I dont.

It was awful.

Imagine seeing your favorite player refuse to honor his signed contract, a deal hed agreed to and signed in good faith.

A poorly timed holdout could spell doom for a contending team and was a miserable experience for a fan base.

We should all be glad we dont see these stories anymore.

Except ...

Well, I mean, if it wasnt happening to your team , then it was kind of fun.

At the very least, youd get some good trade rumors out of the whole thing, and could even talk yourself into your team being the one to land a star player at a discount.

Sure, the star player usually just wound up signing with one of the New York teams, which is when youd go back to being annoyed by the whole thing.

But even then, youd usually get a major trade to chew on.

And in a modern era where its exceedingly rare to see a star traded in anything other than a short-term rental deal, I have to admit I kind of miss when holdouts would force GMs into taking major swings.

(Just not when its your team.

Your team is wonderful and anyone who doesnt want to play there is just greedy.) (Top photo of Steve Larmer: Lou Capozzola / USA Today Network).

This article has been shared from the original article on theathleticuk, here is the link to the original article.