Campy

Yup - I like this signing too.

My understanding is that only the signing bonus and the 1st year's salary are gauranteed. If that's accurate, I'd bring him in, sign him for 3 or 4 years - the guy is a playmaker afterall - and move McGee to nickel. After a couple of years, release Law, and after learning from the likes of Vincent, Clements, and Law, McGee would be in a prime position to take over the position. I'd love to have Ty Law. You can never have enough game-changers IMO.

I just went back and looked at the article again and saw that they were just middle school kids. That's messed-up man...

eegads... Who'd hit that thing?

Yeah... about that clue thingy... Percentage of those 15 to 49 years of age living with HIV/AIDS in 2003 (using 2003 population numbers) World Region........Prevalance Rate North America....................0.6 N Africa/Middle East............0.3 Western Europe..................0.3 East Asia/Pacific.................0.1 Latin America.....................0.6 Australia/New Zealand........0.1 E. Europe/Central Asia........0.5 Sub-Saharan Africa.............7.7 I think it's important to note that the Sub-Saharan region is the only one in the world where homosexual activity and injected drug use aren't identified as primary transmission modes - it's heterosexual activity.

Now that's funny!

How'd he put it? "I've been listening to a lot of classical music lately, like The Police and Tom Petty." Classical music?

I have to admit, I'm pleasantly surprised by his demeanor and his choice of words. He's much more mature sounding than I thought or expected. I hope it translates to onfield performance!

Link to JP's Interview.

Pretend you're the manager of the Buffalo office/team. Like just about every management position I've ever heard of, you have a fiduciary incentive (ie, you make more money) when your team/office performs at a high level - or at least better than the previous year. Why would you send your best personnel to a different team? Obviously, the only way this works is if each team's management has complete control over trades (like corporate hiring and firing) and is incented to dress a competitive team - just like the way GMs are now.

-No argument that JP is unproven, but I don't think he'll hurt us too much. -Jonas Jennings was outperformed by his backup last season while he was hurt... again. -Pat's 33, a super run stopper, a waste of time on the pass rush. He can be replaced. -I think they're being patient, so I'd say,"no new addittions YET." -I've always been of the (sometimes unpoplular) opinion that TD has had some reaaly good drafts, so I'm feeling like we'll get some players there. And lastly, if you're calling patience a "vice" and not a "virtue," I'd agree with you that you weren't blessed with very much of it!!!

I'm not sure how HOA's fit in to all of this, and I think you meant socialisim (an economic system) rather than communism (a political system), but I do appreciate your point. I look at it this way: On a macro level, the government now regulates trade, but it wasn't always that way. The US had operated under Adam Smith's principles of (mostly) free trade propelled by the "Invisible Hand." Teddy Roosevelt saw that, left totally unchecked, corruption and greed takes over as the poor get poorer laboring to make the rich richer. One could argue that the sorry state of the NHL proves Mr Roosevelt's point.

To refer to my situation with Sprint, I had a budget that I submitted every year. It would be modified and tweaked like you wouldn't believe and then returned to me. I sponsored a little league team, gave pay raises, allocated phones for a battered women's shelter, as well as had line items for pay increases, incentive programs, etc, out of that budget. My peers also had their own budget to spend. Not all of my locations generated the same amount of revenue, but as the money went "upstairs," our expenditure for the year was fixed (by the budget I received). Different locations had different rent pricing, but that was accounted for on a location-by-location basis as a line item and had no real bearing on the amount I could use to operate and promote my 5 locations, my team. I may not be explaining it very well, but the revenue goes upstairs to the coporate HQ, who gives each GM a budget to operate and market their office/team. So the NY teams would get a bigger marketing budget than say a Bflo or a Pitt, but the salary rates could be consistent. And granted, LA or Dallas would get more TV money than Columbus or Calgary as they're bigger markets, but that revenue would go upstairs and in effect be poolled - and in a sense allocated toward each team's budget the following year.

If the past 10 years are any indication, he won't. He won't recognize his diminishing skills and will demand to be paid as a premier receiver. I know he just re-did his deal - and I like him - but that's just the way it seems to go these days, especially for the skill position players.

Only if the teams were managed from a central location. If the teams were managed at a local level (like a non-absentee boss in the corporate world), and if the team's management team had fiduciary incentives to produce a winning/successful team (see my post right above yours), there wouldn't be any way a manager would ship all of his valuables players to other teams for no value in return.

For the record: I don't know who the !@#$ he is NOW!

1st off, you're operating under the misguided notion that Bettman is effective now! As far as trades, it'd be simple: Before there was a Sprint PCS, there was Sprint Cellular, and I supervised 5 retail locations for them, which I'll call my team. In each store, which you can liken to a line in hockey, I had different types of employees. I found that having a couple role-players, reps whose sales weren't always in the top 1/3, but I could rely on them to not bend rules and be a consistent performer was important. I also realized that I needed a couple of sales-studs at each location/line to achieve my numbers. Some times they bent rules a bit more than I'd like (like playing one-way and not helping on Defense), but given their production, I could live with that. From time-to-time, a spouse's military transfers, a promotion, an error in judgment of a person's abilities/attributes, or good ol' fashioned attrition, I'd find myself in need of a certain type of "player." I would contact one of my two peers in this market, and ask them to swap person A for person B. Provided my peer agreed to the swap, we asked our manager to confirm the "trade," and then notify the people in question that they would start working at the X office and reporting to Y on Z date. If I was contacted about taking a person, I'd evaluate the personnel I had and made a determination if the person would be a better fit for my team (because I needed different types of personalities and styles to succeed) than the person I was asked to give up. Sometimes I'd agree on the trade, other times I made counter-offers, and sometimes I just weren't interested in having that particular person joining one of the lines/stores on my team. That said, we all received our paychecks from the same company and the pay grades were consistent throughout the "players," consistent upon performance and value to my "team." And given the incentive-based compensation of sales (which could be easily transferred to performance-based incentives for athletes), the "studs" made substantially more (I had a rep making over 100K/yr - the good old days of cellular... ) than the role players who would make maybe 35-50K/yr. It happens all the time in the real world and works perfectly. I believe it would work equally as well in the professional sports.

Excellent post. The prospect of a patchwork OL is a bit disheartening, but there's little doubt JP is better-suited to running for his life than Drew.

IBM has offices throughout the world, and all of the employees work for IBM, not the "London Office" or the "Toronto Office" and IBM can assign salary ranges for different positions, contingent upon performance. Below average performers receive lower pay, middle-of-the-road employees receive a salary at the midpoint of their range for that position, and exemplorary employees receive pay at the high end of their salary range. A company I worked for had a similar program and it worked fine. I was in management and while my team was not union, the same program was used in the mid-west where there was unionized labor with no issues or problems. I do not see how the ownership consortium would be in violation of anti-trust laws any more than any other large employer with offices in multiple locations using a similar pay model. In fact, I think this type of arrangement is long overdue in professional sports.

I'm more than happy to pass onto TKO, London, Lawyer and Troy Vincent how bad a boss TD is. Darn good thing that Mularkey (and not TD) is the coach, eh?

per WROC-TV, Rochester.

I wasn't asking to make or prove a point. After reading your post I instantly thought of Hammurabi's Code, then the Biblical contradiction (turn the other cheek, slay them with a sword, etc), and the fact that most nations had capital punishment until sometime in the last century (I think). For no real reason, I started thinking about the history of capital punishment, and whether any post-industrial nations, outside of the US and I guess/think Russia, still practice it. I think the French stopped after the Fr Rev... I don't know if anyone else still has it. I guess I was just thinking/posting out loud...

I never said any such thing. I only said that the law says it. I also said that minors should be treated differently than adults in that they shouldn't be sentenced to general population prisons, but in any event, you do raise an interesting point. If minors can be held responsible enough for their actions to warrant sentencing them to death, how can they be deemed too irreseponsible to vote, buy a firearm, or have an abortion (sans parental consent)? A slippery slope indeed.

Ahh.. Hammurabi's Code in all its glory. I'm trying to think - how many post-industrial nations even have capital punishment (besides the US). Anyone know?