Contracts Demystified

If you missed The Hockey Show last night featuring Toronto Furies GM Sami Jo Small, you missed a doozy. Besides Sami giving another world-class interview about everything happening in the Canadian pro women's league, she actually went through the ins and outs of how contracts work in her league thanks to a Twitter questions from Randall Hall. Rarely, if ever, have we been given a glimpse into how the contract structure in women's hockey has worked, so let's go through what Sami said and piece together how players are paid.

According to Sami, there is a pay structure where time of service earns you a specific base salary. She stated, "A first-year player has to make $2000. A second-year player has to make $2500. And a third-and-above has to make $3000. So that's 'base salary' that it's called."

Starting with that information, we can now see how much money of the $100,000 annual salary cap is allotted to base salaries for each player and team based on their time of service. For example, last year's leading rookie scorer, Cayley Mercer, earned just $2000 in base salary for her efforts whereas the league's leading scorer in Kelli Stack, who played three seasons with the Boston Blades before joining Kunlun Red Star, made $3000 in base salary based on her three-plus years of service.

In saying this, one can figure out the base salaries for all six CWHL teams as they sign free agents and draft new players. Victoria Bach, who is a pre-draft signing for the Markham Thunder, will make $2000 in base salary this upcoming season while free agent Brooke Webster, who played for the Vanke Rays last season, will make $2500 in base salary as she begins her second season in the league.

Where there is a little more guessing is in the remaining amount of money where GMs can sweeten the pot for free agents and stars to play. The remaining salary cap money, as Sami stated, can be used by the general managers in any manner they wish. The Toronto Furies, as it stood last season, were paid pretty evenly across the board for base salary with the extra money going to attendance for team practices and events which got the Furies pretty solid buy-in from all players when it came to team functions.

As Sami stated last night, she estimates the Furies have a base salary structure of about $56,000 heading into this season, giving her some $44,000 to play with when it comes to sweetening some deals. She also stated that the remaining money will be portioned out to the women on the team based on their rankings of where she and her coaching staff believe they rank on the team in terms of skill, importance, usage, and other factors.

In knowing how the base salaries are set, we can now effectively look at the salary caps for the teams in future years and determine whether those teams who sign veteran players see more success per dollar spent or whether shrewd drafting, pre-draft signings, and overall chemistry result in championships.

If I had to guess, the latter would see better results, but with names like Stack, Knight, Chuli, and Bozek still being free agents, there might be some change in that opinion depending on where they land.

If nothing else, there's some hope from this writer that this explanation makes it easier to understand how teams are built when it comes to players earning their maximum values in a salary cap world. In the end for both GMs and players, it's the dollars that have to make sense when it comes to salaries.

Until next time, keep your sticks on the ice!