Down Goes Brown Grab Bag: Halloween, Ralph Macchio, and the NHL's Broken Salary System

(Editor's note: Welcome to Sean McIndoe's weekly grab bag, where he writes on a variety of NHL topics. You can follow him on Twitter.)

Hey, it wouldn't be Halloween without NHL players dressing up in weird costumes that are then immediately uploaded to social media.

The third star: Erik Karlsson as a ballerina—Oh great, now we have to spend six months arguing about how Drew Doughty's costume was better.

In case you were wondering, this is the second straight year that Karlsson has put on makeup, a wig and a dress for Halloween. He's just openly baiting Don Cherry at this point.

The second star: Auston Matthews as Ken Bone—Remember the Ken Bone era? Those were good times.

This one narrowly earns the prize for the year's top bone-related costume, edging out Jonathan Toews.

The first star: Jaromir Jagr as whatever he wants—The full costume can be seen here, but it's the dancing that really makes it.

Jaromir Jagr's life is better than yours. It's OK to admit it.

The third star: Michel Therrien—This isn't what it looks like; it's just a weird angle that makes it look like Therrien is holding a beer behind the bench. We think.

— Claude Rosato (@cativomachina)October 23, 2016

Now I'm trying to figure out which NHL coach would be the most likely to just break out a pint during a game. Pretty sure its Jon Cooper.

The second star: These Michigan Hockey alumni—They're competing in an intermission contest. The first two are neat, but stick around for the third.

(That, of course, is Mike Legg, author of this legendary highlight.)

The first star: This Islanders' bobblehead—Ralph Macchio is a longtime Islanders' fan who was the team's celebrity captain back in 1991, and now he's been honored with his own bobblehead. I want one.

Mark your . 12/23 is — New York Islanders (@NYIslanders)October 25, 2016

I haven't seen an Islanders' fan do that much nodding since the last time I asked one if moving to Brooklyn was a huge mistake.

The issue: Yesterday, the Ducks finally signed defenseman Hampus Lindholm, getting him under contract on a six-year deal with a cap hit just north of $5 million.

The outrage: The NHL's salary system might be kind of broken.

Is it justified: Normally, when a player signs a multi-million dollar contract and everyone immediately reacts with shock and horror, it's because the deal was for too much money. That's when we all get up on our soapboxes and start beating the same old drum about pro athletes being overpaid. Why do they make so much? They play a game! What about the firemen and kindergarten teachers!

That's not what's happening here.

No, when Lindolm's contract was announced, the near-unanimous reaction was: Wow, he didn't get anywhere near enough money.

If Hampus Lindholm needs a new agent (he really does), I'm available.

— Dimitri Filipovic (@DimFilipovic)October 27, 2016

And yes, obviously we're talking "enough" in the pro sports context here—the kid isn't going to starve. But the Ducks just signed a legitimate franchise defensemen for less than Brooks Orpik and Dan Girardi make. And they've got him locked in at that price for the next six years, a period that should cover virtually his entire prime. It's a stunningly good deal for Anaheim, one that instantly vaults to the top of any "best contracts in hockey" list.

So what happened? Did Ducks GM Bob Murray use some sort of Jedi mind trick here? Did the market just see some sort of massive over-correction? Does Lindholm need a new agent?

None of the above. Lindholm took a bad deal because he had to. The NHL's CBA forced him to.

There are essentially three types of contracts that an NHL player can sign. There's his rookie deal, which is a fairly standard mix of salary and bonuses without all that much wriggle room. Those deals are the ones that can provide the best value—Connor McDavid is easily the most underpaid player in hockey—but everyone seems OK with that. Fair or not, limited rookie deals are the norm in pro sports, where we've come to accept that young players should prove it for a few years before they really cash in.

Skip ahead to years down the road, when a player can qualify for unrestricted free agency, which is where the big money really arrives. NHL players can get there as early as 25, although most will see their UFA years arrive around their late-20s. The first few days of free agency is when most of the worst contracts in the league are handed out, and these days GMs will often pay big money in advance to keep their star players from getting there. That's true even though a player will almost always be in decline, or very close to it, by the time they get to UFA status.

But in between the rookie deal and UFA goldmine come a player's RFA years, which is where Lindholm was. And that's when top players really do get screwed. Teams can choose to play hardball, and the player has virtually no leverage to push back with other than staying at home. Oh sure, most of these guys are eligible for offer sheets, but those virtually never happen because every team in the league mysteriously (collusion?) chooses not to.

So if you're young and need a new contract, you're kind of out of luck. If you're lucky, maybe you get the Vladimir Tarasenko treatment and the team just gives you a mega-deal anyway. But if you're Lindholm, or Johnny Gaudreau, or Nikita Kycherov, of whoever else, you're going to end up taking what you can get.

That's not the end of the world, because again, most of these guys will eventually make it to UFA status and then get massively overpaid based on reputation alone. And the CBA mandates how big a slice of the overall pie the players get, so it's not like Lindholm's under-market deal is costing the NHLPA anything in the big picture. But it all adds up to a very weird and unfair system, one where star players take a discount during their prime years and then hope to make it back when they're over the hill.

Eventually, some teams are going to get smart and just stop paying market value for anyone's UFA years, loyalty de damned. They'll load up on as many young players as possible on value contracts, and surround them with a handful of grizzled old guys making the veteran minimum. Maybe that's what will shift the way the way the league thinks about contracts. Or maybe the players will take a hard line during the 2020 lockout and get this fixed.

But in the meantime… well, sorry, Hampus. You may be one of the best defensemen in the league, but you won't have a chance to be paid like it until you're not anymore. That's just how it works in the NHL right now.

One of the best stories of the week was the revelation that former NHL defenseman Mike Commodore has been spending time as an Uber driver. So this week, let's go with an obscure player who'd apparently be right up Commodore's alley: Gene "Uber" Ubriaco.

OK, full disclosure: I have no idea what Ubriaco's nickname was. But if hockey players in the 1950s were as creative as they are today, I feel pretty comfortable going with "Uber".

In any case, Ubriaco was one of many decent players who were stuck in the minor leagues during the Original Six era until the 1967 expansion came along and doubled the number of NHL jobs available overnight. The diminutive winger spent eight years in the AHL before finally getting a shot with the expansion Penguins in 1967, at the age of 27. He spent parts of two seasons in Pittsburgh before heading to Oakland, then closed out his career with the Blackhawks in 1970. He'd play three NHL seasons in all, scoring 39 goals and recording 74 points.

It wasn't much of an NHL career. But if you're a fan of a certain age, you probably still recognize Ubriaco's name. That's because he eventually went into coaching, and worked his way up to the head job in Pittsburgh in 1988. That was a fun team that featured 199 points by Mario Lemieux, Rob Brown's 49-goal season, and a big year for Paul Coffey. The Penguins made the playoffs for the first time in the Lemieux era, and won a best-of-seven series for the first time since 1970.

The team stumbled the next season, and Ubriaco was fired early in the season. He went on to coach Team Italy at the 1992 Olympics, and has been with the AHL's Chicago Wolves since 1994.

Centremission (noun)—The moment when you're watching a game, the period ends, you start flipping through the various other games available through the league's Centre Ice cable package, and realize with a growing sense of dread that every single one of them is in intermission too.

It goes without saying that this should be illegal.

Look, I don't know how laws work, but there's no reason this should ever be allowed to happen. OK, if there are only two or three games, maybe you can chalk it up to bad luck. But on a night where there's a busy schedule, somebody somewhere needs to take the initiative to delay one of the games. I don't care how it happens. Maybe a linesman loses a contact lens. Maybe the war room in Toronto calls in to review an icing call for ten minutes or so. Or maybe we just cut the act and have the arena lights dim, the scoreboard flicker, and then Gary Bettman spins around in a big chair and ominously announces that "I don't think anybody will be playing hockey here gentlemen" and then laughs manically until he glances at this watch and quickly says "Never mind, you're good, game on".

Please note that this would also apply to NHL.tv or GameCenter or whatever it is that you online people have, if that product ever actually worked, which is to say it does not apply.

We're only a few days away from Halloween. So in keeping with that theme, here's Michael Myers invading Hockey Night in Canada.

• OK, here's what's actually going on here. This clip, apparently from 1986, features Hockey Night trying to get into the comedy game by inviting some young Second City performers onto the show to perform a few bits. And yes, one of these folks is going to look familiar.

• Our host and straight man here is longtime broadcaster Brian McFarlane. He introduces our first sketch, which will be a bit about Rendez-vous '87, a two-game series between NHL all-stars and the Soviet men's team that was scheduled to take place a few months later. As you can see, the CBC blew their entire production budget on set design.

• The joke here is that the Soviet player gives an answer about "blue jeans" and "chicks", which the interpreter changes to something more acceptable. Then we get the Canadian player, who also has an interpreter even though he just repeats the same question. That's actually pretty funny, and the extra joke about a guy in an Oilers jersey having terrible hair is basically the origin story for Ryan Smyth.

• And yes, our Canadian interpreter is indeed a young Mike Myers, already a veteran of the Toronto sketch comedy scene but still three years away from joining Saturday Night Live, a decade away from making Austin Powers, 20 years away from being terrified on live TV by Kanye West, and 30 years away from letting his hair go completely white and making us all feel old.

• Next up is a legitimate hockey icon: Wayne Campbell, a character Myers had been working on for years by this point. He's missing his sidekick Garth, who won't show up until the SNL days, and there's no guest appearances by Aerosmith or Madonna. Instead, we get Peter Puck, which is pretty much the same thing.

• Myers does a bit about Danny Gallivan, which ends with a pretty decent impression. Wayne would of course go onto star in two movies, which were full of hockey references like Stan Mikita's Donuts and (most memorably) Officer Koharski. Myers would continue to drop little jokes like this into his movies – every true Maple Leaf fan noticed that Austin Powers snuck in a Commander Gilmour and General Borschevsky.

• Man, it's a shame he never made a movie about hockey. Did you hear me? HE NEVER MADE ONE.

• The next bit involves two fans getting busted for violating the "express written consent" warnings that were a fixture of sports broadcasts back then. We also get a dig at Don Cherry's wardrobe, which was funny then because Cherry didn't even start going crazy on the outfits until the 90s.

• Fun fact: One of the guy's watching the game is Dana Andersen, who helped Myers create the Dieter character during their Second City days.

• By the way, as much as we enjoyed these sketches, the Wayne's World movies and everything else, there's no better Mike Myers' moment than the time he went on The Late Show in 1998 and told a long story about meeting Nikolai Borschevsky and trying to explain that he'd named his dog after him even though he didn't speak English, all while a confused David Letterman sat there having no idea what the hell he was talking about. It was the second greatest late-night talk show moment for a Canadian of all-time.

• Our last bit isn't so much a sketch as some sort of tape malfunction. At least that's what I think it is. We see a guy with scary eyes, then a black-hooded figure, and then it's just extended darkness. Is this… is this what death is like? Is this clip like The Ring and we all die after we've watched it? If so, I feel kind of bad about posting it. My bad, everyone, that's on me. I would have thought that if any Mike Myers clip was going to cause the death of everyone who saw it, it would have been Cat In The Hat.

Have a question, suggestion, old YouTube clip, or anything else you'd like to see included in this column? Email Sean at nhlgrabbag@gmail.com.