The signings of the Sedin twins by the Vancouver Canucks on Friday immediately produced two compelling questions.

First, do these guys ever — EVER — do anything on their own without their brother doing exactly the same thing?

Second, why so little?

Not that $7 million (U.S.) per season is nothing. But with the NHL salary cap at $64.3 million this season, the maximum salary any one player can receive is 20 per cent of that figure, or $12.86 million.

So both Daniel and Henrik negotiated, as a cap hit, just 54 per cent of the maximum. Both are top-10 NHL scorers, and Henrik is a former MVP.

Doesn’t that seem a little strange?

Stranger still is that the 33-year-old twins are anything but unusual in the NHL world these days.

The highest cap hit of any player is Alex Ovechkin of the Washington Capitals, who comes in at $9.538 million. That deal was done several years ago, but right now it comes to about 74 per cent of the cap.

Ovechkin is locked in until 2021. With the cap expected to head back up over the next few years, the Cap sniper’s percentage of the maximum salary will almost certainly decrease.

The argument usually presented to explain all of this, of course, is that hockey players understand if they take less, they’ll have a better team to play on.

Which is sort of true.

It’s true as long as the top players in the game, from the Sedins to Ovechkin to Sidney Crosby to Phil Kessel to Steven Stamkos, continue to have this unofficial gentlemen’s agreement that no one will go anywhere close to the maximum.

By agreeing to be underpaid, Crosby et al have essentially engineered a working world in which others are well overpaid.

This reality again moved into sharp relief this week when a possible contract extension for Maple Leafs captain Dion Phaneuf hit the news.

Very good player. Solid leader. Plays all the tough minutes.

But the best defenceman in the league? No. Top 10? Not on most cards. Unlikely to be a member of Team Canada for the Olympics.

So what’s a fair salary?

Well, if Kessel demanded a salary closer to the maximum $12.86 million per season, there would be less money available for Phaneuf. Certainly not $7 million.

The same would be the case for Tyler Bozak of the Leafs, who signed a five-year contract last summer with a salary cap hit of $4.2 million, and for David Clarkson, a free agent signee who received a seven-year contract worth an annual cap hit of $5.25 million.

For what they do, many would see Bozak and Clarkson as overpaid, and if they are, it’s because Kessel is, along with the other top players in the league, leaving lots and lots of money on the table relative to the maximum allowable salary.

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If the likes of Crosby, Ovechkin, Kessel, the Sedins and others started demanding contracts approaching the maximum, their teams would still be able to surround them with good teammates because the general cost of players like Bozak, Clarkson and Phaneuf would have to be much lower.

Take the Sedins and Vancouver. If they were getting $12 million each, and their value to that franchise suggests they might be worth it, then players like Alexandre Burrows ($4.5 million), Alex Edler ($5 million) and Jason Garrison ($4.6 million) would have to be paid significantly less for Vancouver to have the same high quality team under a $64.3 million cap.

But the Sedins accept less. So the others get more.

When there was no cap before 2005, superstar players simply demanded as much as the market would bear. In 2002, Mats Sundin was making $9 million a season for the Leafs. A decade later, only five NHL players (Shea Weber, Crosby, Zach Parise, Ryan Suter and Eric Staal) are making a higher salary this season than Sundin was making over a decade ago.

That same season, 2002-03, Jaromir Jagr was making $11.4 million. Peter Forsberg was making $9.5 million, set to jump to $11 million the following season.

The average NHL payroll that season was about $41 million, but the stars were taking bigger chunks.

None of this is good or bad. The cap system guarantees the players a certain percentage of revenues, and it’s just a question how that amount of money is divvied up among the players. Maybe it will change; certainly you can imagine if the Islanders want to keep Tomas Vanek, they might have to go north of $10 million.

From this perspective, the NHL structure is markedly different than the NBA, which has a “soft” cap. About 20-25 players — including Rudy Gay of the Raptors — take the maximum contract allowable.

That’s very different economic behaviour than the NHL. And a larger percentage of NBA players are then paid much, much less so the big boys can get their money.

So a lot of second- and third-tier NHL players are benefitting because the very best players in the world take less.

Who knew superstar hockey players were socialists at heart?

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