On Melnyk
Eric Duhatschek takes a stab at making sense of Eugene Melnyk’s decision to file a grievance in the Heatley affair. I don’t think he succeeds, because I don’t buy the premise that Melnyk’s actions amount to a “pre-emptive shot across the union’s bow”. I don’t think it really matters to the NHLPA or the league for that matter. Its just another grievance, one that will be processed like every other grievance. (Which probably means it won’t be heard for years.) If anything, the NHLPA welcomes the opportunity to get in the news in something other than a negative way.
Melnyk is a rich guy who likes his money and he thinks Heatley has some of it. That he doesn’t have a good legal case doesn’t make any difference to a guy like Eugene. He isn’t going to let go of $4 MM without a fight. Yashin had a case as good as Heatley’s and he lost, didn’t he? Besides what does it cost Melnyk? His fanbase will applaud. He can play the martyr for a while longer and dump on Heatley some more. If Heatley is going to keep his money then Eugene is going to do four million dollars worth of complaining about it. Melnyk is a rich guy who likes his money. I don’t think the grievance is any more complicated than that.
Publicly, the NHL’s position – on the rare occasions when commissioner Gary Bettman will discuss the NHLPA’s trials and tribulations – is that the league believes a strong union is good for business.
Deep down, it is hard to imagine they truly believe that.
Gary defines a strong union as one that exists. And a union that exists is absolutely essential to the league’s business model. Bettman wanted to break the Union during the lockout but he did not want to destroy it. During the lost season I often expressed the opinion that one could not be done without the other. The jury is still out – maybe somebody will figure out a way to make the NHLPA work – but it sure looks to me like the organization is imploding.
I don’t think you can underestimate how angry Melnyk is. Like most rich dudes, Eugene is a pretty proud guy, and to have some 28 year old publicly pee on his shoes outraged him to no end. He is just looking to make Heatley’s life as difficult as possible, although I don’t think he will have much luck – that is why Dany hires agents and lawyers. The best Eugene could do would be to squeeze some of that money out of San Jose, although it is hard to imagine how that could happen given that Heatley was not Shark property at the time it was paid.
What this should really be is a cautionary tale about handing out no movement clauses. GMs have been giving them away like crazy as an inducement to get a player to sign a long term deal. It appears to be cost-free at the time, but as Heatley just proved, it was anything but for the Senators. The worst part is that every star player in the league you care to name has a similar clause, making it almost impossible to trade a guy like Heatley for equivalent value. This isn’t the players’ problem, but rather the GMs – if you want to hand a contractual hammer like that to a player, don’t be surprised if he turns around and actually uses it one day.
I don’t think you can underestimate how angry Melnyk is. Like most rich dudes, Eugene is a pretty proud guy, and to have some 28 year old publicly pee on his shoes outraged him to no end. He is just looking to make Heatley’s life as difficult as possible
Pretty much. I don’t think this choice should be connected to the NHL-NHLPA relationship.
I don’t think GMs have much choice. There is a limit to the money they can offer to attract players and there is no limit on no trade clauses at least until Gary decides what changes he wants in his next CBA.
Just to note, as far as I can tell, this grievance was launched and reported upon last summer. And im sure Melnyk, like most Sens fans, was still angry. And then, although nothing new seemingly has happened, it was reported again last week.
As fans, there is no real emotional investment in the issue for us, whether Melnyk or Heatley or Sharks mgmt gets to buy a new boat with the $4mil. Im over it, thank you very much. However, there was one issue surrounding the nature of the waiving of the NMC I was wondering about, purely from a procedural interest.
Melnyk must feel like he took all the appropriate steps in order to not have to pay the $4mil, which was technically signing bonus I believe. As angry as he was, he acquiesced to the demand and made a trade from a position of weakness to accommodate Dany. He asked his GM to then bite the bullet and make the best trade possible in hard circumstances. And his GM did a pretty good one. Murray first approached the Heatley camp and asked if it was ok to talk to Edmonton amongst the other teams on their list of teams they would waive for. As Heatley wanted options, he agreed, allegedly, that it was ok to talk to Edmonton.
Now perhaps that implicit verbal waiving of the NMC isn’t worth the paper it was written on, but what is it? Heatley wanted to act like a ufa, where he would put out there the teams he wanted to play for, and then he would solicit and choose the best offer. But he was Sens property not a UFA, regardless of his nmc. The right to choose the destination should no more belong to Heatley than it did to Moyes in Phoenix. A player with an nmc should be able to list the teams he would waive for when requesting a trade, but as Sens property, it should then be the Sens decision which trade the team will make. Heatley’s camp was trying to usurp that right, acting somewhat in bad faith. And that cost Melnyk $4mil who procedurally did no wrong.
I still don’t think the actual technical issue the grievance would be revolving around has been revealed. It must be a struggle to find one. But that would bug me if I was Melnyk.