We are now mere days away from the start of NHL training camps, and in many cases rookies and veterans alike have already taken the ice for informal workouts, captains' practices, and the like.

The problem with that, though, is that there is a fairly surprising number of restricted free agents who enter the season without a contract, and that could be a part of a very troubling trend for teams going forward.

It's probably safe to say that a lot of players around the league weren't especially happy with the terms foisted upon them – in so draconian a manner – by the owners as they brought the lockout to its merciful end last January. It gave players less of a chance to earn a lot of money for a longer period of their careers — for the good of the league and all that — and simultaneously seems to have taken away a lot of rights for restricted free agency that could help the younger players in particular to earn paydays commensurate with their skill levels.

What the new CBA also seems to have done is allowed teams to start digging in their heels once again over the "second contract" or "bridge contract" or "not especially fair contract" that had become so much less prevalent in the wake of the Second Bettman Lockout (2BL).

Kevin Lowe, of course, is the reason that type of contract ceased to be a common thing in the NHL, having extended massive offer sheets to both Thomas Vanek and Dustin Penner in the summer of 2007 and inspiring that whole barn-fightin', name-callin' feud with Brian Burke. With those two deals — one accepted by the Ducks, the other matched by the Sabres — RFA contracts got, in the view of teams themselves, seriously out of whack.

To some extent, too, that was true. After all, Penner pulled $4.25 million a year against the cap on that offer sheet, and Vanek's likewise landed him more than $7.14 million. This was when the salary cap was just $50.3 million altogether. The percentage of that money against the cap would have made them worth $5.4 million and $9.13 million, respectively in today's dollars. Now, granted, Vanek was coming off his career-best season at 43 goals and 84 points, and so it might have been reasonable to assume that he'd be due somewhere north of $8 million at this point, but Penner was the David Clarkson of his era, racking up 29 goals and 45 points (albeit following a dominant season at the AHL level).

Other RFAs, and their agents, looked at those deals and said, "Me too." Prior to that, they'd generally been paid more on their second deals than on their entry-level contracts, as you might expect, but they were typically not yet cashing in the big bucks that production like Vanek's 40-plus-goal-and-point-a-game season would have been due to someone on an expiring deal who, say, had some unrestricted years in his very near future. It used to be that the only way to cash in on major production for the most part was to wait out UFA status. After the Lowe offer sheets, that was no longer the case. It only makes sense.

All of which brings us to the present, and a time during which young players are paid for their production, for the most part (some remain, somewhat bafflingly, paid for their potential, which is something that's not always easy to understand; frankly, one need look no deeper than the James van Riemsdyk debacle in Philadelphia a few years ago to see how that kind of thing will often turn out). Being paid the same at 22 that a 28-year-old producing about the same amount seems like a wholly equitable way of doing things.

Which is why it's so weird to see what's happening across the league now.

With the advent of this new and allegedly improved collective bargaining agreement, teams seem once again emboldened to try to hold guys coming off their ELCs to the old adage that you can't get paid until you've been in the league a good four or five years at minimum. The problem with this is that it's a sad and potentially very costly attempt to close the barn doors about six years after Kevin Lowe threw them open and started throwing rocks at the horses and yelling, "You get outta here! Go on now git!"

Not that there hadn't been more holdouts during the time between the two most recent lockouts, with at least Drew Doughty and Kyle Turris having gone through their own at the beginning of the 2011-12 season. Turris's lasted until late November, whereupon he signed with Phoenix, played six games, and was packed off to Ottawa with a deal that paid him just $1.4 million against the cap (though honestly, with his piddling production in Phoenix, that sounds just about right). Doughty, of course, cashed in, as well he should have.

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