The Bucks Start Here

Time was when an NHL player was happy to have enough money to pay his dental bills. No longer. Hockey players, who once performed at slave wages compared with their baseball, football and basketball counterparts, have forced several teams to open their safes and fork over the funds.

The team that gave away the combination to the vault is none other than the St. Louis Blues. For 23 seasons, St. Louis was nothing more than a mom-and-pop franchise, paying its players nickels and dimes and, at best, turning a meager profit. Over the past six seasons, the Blues have never finished more than four games under or more than six games over .500. Although they made the playoffs each year during the 1980s, only once did they advance beyond the second round.

But as low as St. Louis was in the standings, it ranked even lower on the pay scale. In fact, it had the stingiest payroll in 1989-90. Over the years, general manager Ron Caron traded the Blues' better talents to contenders for groups of lower-salaried players. Indeed, between '86 and '88, Caron sent 10 players to the Calgary Flames, and six wound up helping the Flames win the Stanley Cup in '89. However, one of those trades with the Flames brought to St. Louis right wing Brett Hull, now 26. The son of Bobby Hull, hockey's greatest left wing, he had excellent bloodlines but a thick waistline. Last season, though, young Hull lost weight, became a 72-goal scorer and played out his option.

It was assumed, quite naturally, that St. Louis would do what it always had done with a star player: lose him. "That wasn't the attitude toward just the hockey team in this town," says the Blues president, Jack Quinn. "The feeling that permeated the fans here was that the muckety-mucks who ran sports in this city had let everything get away: Jack Clark [the former Cardinals slugger who now plays for the San Diego Padres], the football Cardinals, everything. Bobby Hull was quoted last year as saying, 'They don't have enough money in the city of St. Louis to sign Brett.' That really hurt. The input we got from the fans was that they were unequivocally willing to pay higher ticket prices to keep him."

So in June, Hull, who made $125,000 last season, signed a four-year deal with the Blues that calls for annual salaries of $1.16 million, $1.5 million, $1.6 million and $2.2 million. The contract, negotiated for Hull by Bob Goodenow, who next year will become executive director of the NHL Players Association, also includes a $600,000 signing bonus and easily attainable performance bonuses that could bring Hull's first-year salary to $1.5 million.

This was a breakthrough contract. Wayne Gretzky of the Los Angeles Kings will make $3 million this season, counting deferred payments. Mario Lemieux of the Pittsburgh Penguins will earn $2.3 million. But these two players are in a separate universe—nobody fills seats the way they do. The next-highest-paid player last season in straight salary—bonuses, deferred payments and perks promised by handshakes not included—was the Edmonton Oilers' Mark Messier, the league MVP, who made $832,000. (Steve Yzerman's total compensation with the Detroit Red Wings was an estimated $1.4 million, but his base salary was $700,000.)

Before lines could form outside other teams' offices because of the ripple effect of the Hull contract, the Blues dropped an even bigger bomb. In July they presented an eye-opening offer sheet to Scott Stevens, 26, a free-agent defenseman who last season had earned $300,000 with the Washington Capitals. Even though Stevens had made the end-of-season All-Star team only once in his eight previous NHL seasons, St. Louis offered him a $1.4 million signing bonus and a four-year contract calling for annual salaries of $775,000, $875,000, $975,000 and $1.1 million. Washington did not exercise its option to match the offer, electing under the NHL's highly restrictive free-agent system to take compensation in draft choices instead.

Following the Stevens signing, teams and agents sparred lightly for almost two months to see what Harry Sinden, the Boston Bruins' venerable general manager, would do about the new contracts he had promised Ray Bourque, the best defenseman in the league, and tough, talented right wing Cam Neely. In late August the Bruins raised Bourque's salary, which had been $500,000 in 1989-90, to $1.1 million a year for the next four seasons. Neely went from $325,000 per year to $3.65 million over four years. Soon a number of other top players—including defenseman Al MacInnis of Calgary, winger Rick Tocchet and goalie Ron Hextall of the Philadelphia Flyers and center Denis Savard (page 88) of the Montreal Canadiens—signed deals that will earn them $1 million a year or close to it (chart, below).

Now that the stars are raiding the vault, it remains to be seen whether a few of the loose bills waft down to journeymen players. Sinden projects a league-wide increase in player salaries of 20% to 30% this season. He says most teams will be forced to cross the threshold of what the league has long considered a prudent player payroll—50% of total revenues. Without question, Sinden and other general managers would like to have Caron's scalp. "What the Blues did was their business," says Sinden, "but they cannot shirk the fact that what they did has hamstrung everybody in hockey."

It ought to be remembered, though, that the penurious Sinden has cried wolf on rising costs before. Boston is the nation's sixth-largest television market—and a hockey-mad one at that—so the Bruins are in position to earn more TV money than most other teams. The new Boston Garden, scheduled to open in time for the 1993-94 season, will have 104 luxury boxes and 4,000 more seats than the old Garden. The new place will make a grand bomb shelter in which the Bruins will be able to withstand salary fallout.