Souray to Edmonton

Well there you have it folks, the last of the big-name free agents finds himself a team, going to Edmonton for 5 years at 5.4 million per year. When I heard he was going to the Oilers I was prepared for the worst salary-wise, but 5.4 million seems downright reasonable. This says a bit about the interest Souray generated on the free agent market. First of all he signs with Edmonton of all teams. Yeah he's from Alberta, but seriously, If you were an NHL player, knowing what you do about the state of that organisation right now, would you want to play in Edmonton? In adition to that, he was the last big-name free agent on the market and he was dealing with Kevin "I'm trying to keep my job here" Lowe, who's got to be absoulutely desperate to bring in a big name at this point. You're telling me 5.4 million per year was the best offer he could get? I'm thinking that either Souray took a lower salary to play in his home province or there wasn't as much interest in him as it was thought there would be.

About this Kevin Lowe business

Not that I'm trying to defend Kevin Lowe here or anything but I'm tired of reading everyone's complaints about how he's the most evil bastard in the world for giving Vanek an offer sheet. The man didn't do anything illegal. He took advantage of an existing clause in the CBA, a clause that I presume was put in there in order to be used. If you're going to have all this stigma attatched to it then why even bother having Restricted Freee Agency in the first place?

Isn't this whole process dangerously close to collusion? If a bunch of NHL(or say baseball....) owners got together and verbally agreed to limit the offers made to each other's players in order to keep salaries down they'd be in a lot of legal trouble. How different is that from the current situation where the league's GM's are essentially agreeing not to take advantage of a clause in the CBA that would probably drive up player salaries?