The Rich Get Rich. The Good Get Better.

The hockey media have resorted to hyperbole to explain how the Caps have gotten so lucky this week in their upgrade at goalie, but it's not luck at all, and the skill involved is mostly patience. The same "luck" has worked out this week for the Boston Bruins, as they "failed" to keep their second best defenseman.

In a sport like baseball, where the New York Yankees have a taxpayers subsidized stadium, the best TV deal in the history of ever for anything, and more money to spend than the rest of the league put together, you always know where the best players will end up. It's like the rest of the league is just playing to get scouted by New York. Hockey is decidedly not baseball.

In hockey, the New York Rangers have to compete in the same market with that sort of ridiculous economic absurdity, so they have to go out periodically and sign a bunch of overpriced free agents. Thankfully, under the salary cap, this keeps the Rangers from ever winning anything, because they always overpay for their best players, and while they do own their own lucrative cable network and certainly have money for other good players, they aren't allowed to spend it, because they're already at the cap with one or two superstars and a bunch of scrubs.

Before the salary cap, the NHL gave teams the right to match any offer to the players they had drafted or traded for until they were at least thirty years old, maybe older. In hockey years, thirty isn't quite seventy, but it's certainly over the hill. The Rangers were able to buy exactly one championship, back in 1994. That's the only one they've had since 1940.

Meanwhile, teams that are forced periodically, by economic and hockey phenomena, to field bad teams and collect the resulting high draft picks, can do a much better job of getting the players they need at a low cost.

This played out very well for the Capitals this week when they traded away Simeon Varlamov, a recent 24th overall pick of theirs, who was in great danger of leaving for Europe, to get the first and second round picks of the Colorado Avalanche. The Avalanche just finished twenty-ninth in the thirty team NHL, so the Caps hope their pick will be somewhere in the top five next year. If Varlamov had left for Europe, the Capitals would have gotten nothing but an earful from their fans and loyal media.

The Colorado Avalanche will pay Varlamov $8.5 million to play the next three seasons with them. For Colorado, this amounts to a significant savings over their only other option, of pursuing an unrestricted free agent starting goalie. To begin with, there were only two such players available this year. Philadelphia traded for early negotiating rights with one of them, and wound up paying Ilya Bryzgalov $56 million to play six years with them.

That narrowed the field to one candidate good enough to make Colorado into an average team. Tomas Vokoun had already been earning $5.7 million per year to play with the Florida Panthers. He's older than most of the Avalanche, so he probably wouldn't be a long-term solution, and his likely price tag of seven or eight million dollars per season might keep the Ave from being able to keep up with the salary needs of their young core of talented forwards.

Trading for Varlamov gave the Avalanche half as good a goalie as Vokoun at a third of the price. This helps them build their team and keep it together. Varlamov has less NHL experience, but he has represented Russia at all levels of international play, and he continues to grow. In his young NHL career, Varlamov has 30 wins, 11 losses and five over-time losses. In his first start, he shut out the Canadiens in Montreal. He has won a playoff series in relief for former MVP Jose Theodore. Trading two draft picks for such a good player was a great move for Colorado, given their position and their options. Objective media in Canada are praising Colorado for taking a risk in giving up a high pick to get such a great young goalie.

On the other hand, from where the Capitals sit, they have a great team, and they don't really need a great goalie. When Tomas Vokoun found out his job in Colorado was taken, he started looking around the league. Florida replaced him with the disgraced Theodore at 1.5 million per year. Vokoun had lost what fans and media call a game of musical chairs. Most teams are in long term commitments with one or two goalies, and dont' have room to take on a talented veteran.

So Vokoun realized he had to write off this year as far as earning money and look at it as a chance to prove himself capable of winning. Since he had been upstaged by Varlamov, and since he had spent several years playing in the Southeast Division, which is basically owned by the Capitals, Vokoun had two good reasons to want to come to Washington and prove himself. He not only gets to lord it over the Panthers who didn't sign him. He also gets to play behind the same offense and defense that helped Varlamov put up his stellar numbers.

NHL.com calmly writes that the Caps have an impressive, inexpensive duo of netminders, describing the combination of Vokoun and Michal Neuvirth as one of the best in the league and certainly the least expensive. This has Yahoo.com joking that Capitals general manager George McPhee must be blackmailing the entire league.

In fact, there is nothing behind the scenes and there is nothing unfair about this acquisition. The Capitals lost for several years in the early to mid Aughts and they drafted well as a result. They have since had a lot of talented players around, and managed them with a combination of patience and careful scouting. The same approach has worked for the Boston Bruins who just won the Stanley Cup.

When Boston won, they did their best to sign all their players within the salary cap. This is usually impossible for a Cup champion, because all of a champion's players are suddenly champions themselves, and can get raises for bringing that championship experience to any team that has not won a championship in the last couple years. The Bruins have kept all of their core players except for recently acquired defenseman Tomas Kaberle.

After a week of negotiations, Kaberle followed the money out of town to Carolina, signing a contract for three years and twelve and three quarters million dollars. Then the Carolina Hurricanes suddenly found themselves worried about how much they were spending on defensemen. They had to get rid of Joe Corvo, another offensive defenseman who is similarly one dimensional but who has not recently won a Stanley Cup. Looking around the league, the Hurricanes found out that the Boston Bruins were vaguely interested, and traded Corvo to the Bruins, who will pay him 2.5 million dollars to do the same job.

While Corvo is less expensive and less respected that Kaberle, they are basically interchangeable parts. Corvo scored 40 points this season playing with a non-playoff team. Kaberle scored 47 points, finishing the season with the Stanley Cup winner. Kaberle has 84 goals in his career, not bad for a defenseman. Corvo has 79. Kaberle is 6'1" and 198 lbs. Corvo is 6'0" and 204. So far, only their mothers could tell them apart.

Kaberle does have move than twice as many NHL assists, but Kaberle has also played almost twice as many NHL games. Corvo is a couple years younger and was drafted in the fourth round, when pretty good hockey players are often available. Kaberle is a little older and was drafted in the eighth round. The eighth round was so lame that the NHL has since cancelled it. Players who aren't picked in the first seven rounds just aren't worth the time it takes to sit and wait for teams to make up their minds.

So Boston loses a guy who started out completely unremarkable and went on to score about eighty goals from the blueline. In the same day, they pick up a guy who started out pretty respectable and went on to score about eighty goals from the blueline. Carolina just managed, through free agency, to get the same defenseman they had last year at twice the price. The difference form Carolina's perspective is that Kaberle had Stanley Cup experience and can mentor their other players.

From Boston's perspective, they have at least eighteen guys who can mentor and teach about what it's like to win a Stanley Cup. With what they just saved on their new power play quarterback, they also have the money to add another player or two to learn those lessons and help them try to repeat.

Sports with salary caps are very, very different from sports without salary caps. You don't just go out and get the best player you can. You have to get the best combination of players whose talents and personalities can work together. If you mess up any part of that recipe, you pretty much have to wait until the next summer to make big changes without getting totally ripped off. And even in the summer, when you're dealing with the successful teams, as Colorado and Carolina know too well right now, the best deal you can hope for is still going to feel like getting totally ripped off.

Oh, and the New York Rangers? After finishing eighth in the East, they just signed the best available free agent of the summer, Brad Richards. He's friends with their coach, and a former mainstay on the second line of their coach's old team, the Tampa Bay Lightning. He's under 6'2 but he plays somewhat physically and he has put up 220 goals and over four hundred and fifty assists in a long NHL career that has seen him play for good and bad teams in the East and in the West. Incidentally, that also describes the man he replaces in the center spot on the Rangers top line, Vaclav Prospal. The difference? Richards has seven fewer goals, one more Stanley Cup (one), one more season with eighty or more points (two) and about sixty million dollars more on his current contract. Prospal, in spite of the similar resume, remains unsigned after an abysmal 2010-11 campaign. Because the Rangers can't afford him. And no one else apparently thinks he's worth much.