|
I'm not 100% on this, but I do not believe players get paid in the event of a strike/lockout, so that is irrelevant to the 1 yr term on Parise's deal. Basically he signed the 1 yr term to avoid an arbitration hearing. NJ filed for arbitration so teams cannot give him an offer sheet as a current RFA. With arbitration it is essentially Parise telling the mediator how awesome he is and asking for fair market value, and the team telling the mediator why they do not think he is worth as much as he is asking for, basically mudslinging on both sides which has the potential to hurt the team-player relationship depending on how far each party decides to take it.
Hansen's deal being frontloaded like that is kind of weird, it's not an obvious attempt to circumvent the cap like paying Airhoff $10M for 2011-12, especially if anybody is anticipating a 25% salary cut across the board like what happened with the last CBA strike/lockout. With how some of the recent contracts have been gifted out, this would not be a surprise to me at all. Hopefully Hansen can continue to improve on his performance and come year 2 and 3, the $1.3M he is set to earn will make it seem like an absolute steal (like Burrows' current deal, and to a lesser extent Kesler's current deal).
|