Normally, this kind of thing wouldn’t cross our radar, but maybe we’re getting older and more sensitive (wise?) to the ridiculousness of professional sports’ salaries. On NHL Saturday today, we’re looking at Carey Price: a goaltender who has played in just five games since the end of the 2021 season, yet is still collecting paychecks for some reason. In his prime, he was amazing, but his narrative is a rough one now.

He finished fourth in the 2008 Calder vote; he won the Hart and Vezina votes in 2015 (we didn’t agree with either, for the record). He played in six All-Star games over the course of his long career: 2009, 2011-2012, 2015, 2017-2018. Price also is one of the best players, sabermetrically, in the history of the storied Montréal Canadiens franchise. We say that respectfully in a week that has seen the passing of Ken Dryden, to boot.

In that stellar 2015 season, he did win the Triple Crown of goaltending (perhaps we need to revisit that one, for consistency’s sake?), and one other season he topped the league in victories (2011) as well. Alas, after playing in a league-high 58 games in the interrupted Covid season of 2019-2020, Price’s career went downhill in a hurry at age 33 due to a myriad of health problems, both mental and physical. It’s pretty sad.

But why we are today is also rough, in another way, as he cries himself to sleep every night on a huge pile of money: Price is still getting paid through 2026. According to ESPN, “Price was placed on long-term injured reserve prior to the 2022-23 campaign and has remained there ever since. This is the final season of Price’s eight-year, $84 million contract.” And the Habs just traded him to the San Jose Sharks in a salary dump.

It seems like Price literally is stealing money by not formally retiring. But then the Sharks are used to this by now, thanks to their Logan Couture situation—similar to the Price story: Couture has played in just six games since the end of the 2023 season, but he, too, is still getting paid by the San Jose organization. All of this noise is about cap space, which isn’t at as much of a premium for the Sharks and their low expectations.

According to San Jose Hockey Now, “… the Sharks still have $9.24 million in cap space, even counting the ticketed-for-IR contracts of Price and Logan Couture ($8 million AAV).” The fact the NHL has enabled these kinds of contracts for basically “dead” players is the insane part. We should all be so lucky to get paid to not work, right? This sort of garbage financing, at the expense of the fans’ wallets, really, needs to stop now.

Yet here we are in a society today where vital industries face financial cuts, and pampered athletes get paid millions to do nothing. How did we find ourselves here? Tribalism is real, and too many fans paying money to wealthier people for no good reason is part of the problem. The NHL isn’t even the highest moneymaker among the major North American professional sports leagues, and it’s still wasting people’s money like this.