Jurgen Klinsmann, the head coach of the U.S. men's national soccer team, recently made a very interesting point about the way in which North American sports conduct themselves with respect to signing free agents:

“This always happens in America. Kobe Bryant, for example — why does he get a two-year contract extension for $50 million? Because of what he is going to do in the next two years for the Lakers? Of course not. Of course not. He gets it because of what he has done before. It makes no sense. Why do you pay for what has already happened?”

Obviously no one in the NHL, even the very best players, is pulling $25 million a season, but the principle is the same, more or less. In the NHL, players are paid as much for what they have done as what they are going to do. This is done over and over again, without much acknowledgement given to the fact that players decline as they age.

It's been front of mind for a lot of people this week as the period during which amnesty buyouts can officially take place began on Monday morning. So far, it seems that Dallas has plans to buy out Aaron Rome, but no one else was placed on waivers for the purposes of a buyout yesterday. Several speculated that this had to do with the fact that teams are shopping for takers who might unburden them from cutting checks worth as much as tens of millions over the next few years for players they don't want any more.

Brad Richards perhaps symbolizes this best of all. It wasn't so long ago that he signed with the New York Rangers for a cap-circumventing nine-year deal that would have paid him $60 million, most of which was paid in the first few years of the deal. That he carries a cap hit of $6.67 million today, as a 34-year-old, isn't so bad (but it's not good either). That he'd carry it through 2020, when he'd be turning 40, very much is.

But the thing is, this was only the third of nine years in the contract, meaning that the Rangers essentially paid $33 million (part of that carved out due to the lockout) to Richards for three years of service during which time he has largely been seen as a disappointment. Anyone could have seen that this would be a problematic contract, because when he came to New York, Richards was coming off concussion issues, and already 31 years old. He was actually pretty good in the regular season if you're only playing for points, but being healthy-scratched or demoted to the fourth line in two consecutive playoffs is a fairly reasonable measure of his contributions overall. In short, the Rangers knew they'd have to buy out this contract at some point, the moment they signed it.

Maybe this fluky run to the Cup Final makes the $11 million a year in actual cash seem worth it even if he did end it playing fourth-line minutes and still not getting much done; it's not like they weren't going to spend that kind of silly money another way even if they'd never signed him. But it still leads one to wonder why they signed that deal at all. Part of it was obviously those last three no-value years; Richards was essentially being paid five percent of the worth of the contract over the final third of it as a means of keeping down the per-year price tag, a practice that has been outlawed under the new CBA, and rightly so. Moreover, this means the compliance buyout that will inevitably land later this week is partly an attempt to get out from under the “cap recapture” penalty Richards would bring to his team when he retired like two years from now.

But overall, this is a deserved buyout on a contract that was never going to live up to the money it carried with it. The Rangers were, plain and simple, eager to make a splash on free agent day three summers ago and they threw a ton of money at a guy who may as well carried flashing yellow “WARNING” signs with him everywhere he went. Such is life in the NHL's free agency pool, where, to Klinsmann's point, guys are rewarded for what they have done, not what they will do. Richards put up consecutive seasons of more than a point a game in his final two years with Dallas: 91 in 80 and then 77 in 72. The money Glen Sather gave him to come to New York can either be seen as a reward for that, or Sather expecting him to replicate those numbers on the wrong side of 30 for a more defensive team. You see how it worked out.

This kind of cautionary tale litters the NHL. Buyer's remorse is (or should be) everywhere: Eric and Jordan Staal and Cam Ward in Carolina, Pekka Rinne in Nashville, Dion Phaneuf in Toronto, Mike Green in Washington, Mike Richards in LA, Ville Leino in Buffalo, Shawn Horcoff and Sergei Gonchar in Dallas, Mike Ribeiro in Phoenix, Dan Girardi in New York, Keith Yandle in Phoenix, Andrew MacDonald in Philadelphia. Players are paid for the perception of what they are or have been, rather than the reality of the situation.

And yet this summer, there's going to be a line out the door to sign Matt Niskanen for as much money as possible because he put up a career-high 46 points and was generally a pretty good driver of possession (partly because spent most of his TOI with Evgeni Malkin, James Neal, and Jussi Jokinen, against only-okay competition), as a 27-year-old, meaning that most of the rest of his career is going to be a slow, steady downward descent into not being anywhere near as good as he was. Marian Gaborik and Thomas Vanek are both going to get term and dollars for their new deals, despite being 32 and 30, respectively. Someone's going to give 38-year-old Dan Boyle $5 million against the cap, just you wait and see. Andrei Markov, at 35, wants three years at $6 million per, and it's not outside the realm of possibility that he gets just that.

Why? Because that's what free agents get: Big money, lots of years. But that's not what teams pay for. They pay for the notoriety of saying they caught the big fish. And a few years down the line, they get headaches and buyout candidates.

But at least the cap is going up.