But if you look back about thirty years ago, you'll see how the Montreal Canadiens built their powerful teams of the 1970s by taking advantage of the expansion teams. A lot of those expansion were always short on cash, so the Habs would offer them a veteran player that was past it but still had a name, and sweeten the pot with a bit of cash in exchange for draft picks. The expansion team's hope was that this veteran player would at the very least sell tickets or maybe even improve the team (and of course cash is always a good thing). Often this was not the case, the expansion team almost always missed the playoffs and finished with a low point total. This meant those draft picks that were traded to the Habs ended up being real gems, Guy Lafluer, and Ken Dryden just to name a couple.

I guess the point I'm trying to make is cash was thrown around back in the day too. I guess you could look at those draft picks as UFAs in some respect because the Habs had to throw some cash at the teams that held the rights to those picks in order to help secure them.

Anyone who tries to tell me about "the good old days of baseball/basketball/hockey/football" when "they were just in it for the game" gets laughed at. These have always been businesses, always will be. We just idolize the old days because we either weren't there to see them or are glorifying them.

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It's funny watching those old clips of the past Yankee greats and yet few people know of their dirty little secret of those "glory days."

The Yanks would often buy great players and prospects from cash-strapped teams and stick them in the minors to basically rot. The Yanks never really did this to improve their team, the idea was to deprive other teams of high quality players. My grandfather used to joke and say the 3rd best catcher in all of baseball from 1925-1960 was on the Yanks farm team.

I'm sure if some more digging was done you'd find similar stories in other pro sports during the "glory days".