Mëds wrote: ↑Tue Jul 09, 2019 2:18 am
Hockey Widow wrote: ↑Mon Jul 08, 2019 4:48 pm
GMs have to learn. Unfortunately it seems most never do. Benning was blindly foolish signing Ericksson. He was foolish to chase Lucic. Most people said so at the time. Did he learn? I think he did. It should be hard for him to get out from under Ericksson’s contract. It should be excruciating for him.
No, it wasn't foolish. $6M for a guy who could skate, play 200ft, PP and PK, and score 50-60 points is a good price so long as term is reasonable depending upon the player's age.
Prior to coming here there had never been a report of Eriksson having character issues, and Benning would have known since he was the Assistant GM in Boston who allegedly was a guy the players really liked. Loui becoming a 30 point sloth who would rather complain in the press and not answer his employer's calls is on Loui, not Benning.
In a perfect world you pay contracts in arrears on 1 year terms...Once the season is over you give out contracts based on what the players did that season.....You do the same year after year....
But that is la la land stuff, what the league does is guarantee a price for future performance for up to 7 or 8 years which it has no way of knowing if the player will live up to the contract, get injured, have off ice issues or anything else that happens in real life which affect his play....sometimes the league changes its rules which can affect a players performance....
Or the league can sometimes arbitrarily penalize a team for breaking a rule that was legal at the time it was made as in the Luongo recapture penalty....
They do this in an auction type system where teams bid against themselves....And to make it even more risky, they give the teams a small window in which to negotiate and sign the players....
Reminds me of the old days on the water before fisheries instituted quotas....Boats congregating waiting for the opening of the fisheries season and when the bell went off it was bedlam with captains shooting at each other if they thought someone was cheating and nobody knowing when the bell would sound again to end the season....
And little is made of the escrow system where when it was first implemented the league envisioned that some teams would spend near the floor and some teams would spend near the ceiling and when you averaged it out, they collectively spent near the middle...
In fact, most teams are now spending near the ceiling and escrow is becoming a major issue for the teams and the players...
And under this system some times, actually many times they make mistakes....
To make matters more risky, gone are the days of the second contract and today RFA's are being signed to very expensive, multi year contracts after having played in the league for only 3 years....
For the first time since I can remember pundits and former GM's are talking about a new contract predicting it will be a value contract during the first few years and a gross overpayment during the last half of its term...
If only Loui had given the Canucks some value similar to his last year in Boston during the first few years of his deal in Vancouver....
None of this will change and bad contracts will be handed like candy every year by every team at some point....Maybe not this year and maybe not next year but like death and taxes they will be given out...
When you look at good deals and bad deals, leverage is the key....
Edler didn't want to leave Vancouver and didn't want to retire and the team was able to re sign him to a value contract....
Kesler wanted to leave Vancouver and had control of his destination and limited the team to 1 option and when the team traded him they didn't get full value....
Blame the players or blame the teams, but also blame the system for not having a better tool than the one it has now for flushing out dead contracts...
Take care...