AROUND THE LEAGUE - 25-26

[Tciso]

...and now Connor Murphy follows on the Dickinson heels with his own 5x4.1...

Those 2 will age like fine cheese. But, the cap hit is reasonable. With these signings, is Edmonton seriously thinking of going with the same 2 goalies as last year? Or are they trading Nurse and a goalie and a shit ton of pucks for a real goalie?

[donlever]

Goalie Bob to the Oil.

Binnington to Florida.

[Meds]

Goalie Bob to the Oil.

Binnington to Florida.

That happening, or just speculating?

I can't find anything on Bobrovsky other than Toronto being interested.....but the media says Toronto is interested in everyone.

[donlever]

Directly out of my ass.

Socialz has had snippets of Bob to the Oil for months but all from non-reputable sources so no substance to it.

Nice trade posts over the past week or so by the way.

Shame re limited response.

[Meds]

Directly out of my ass.

Socialz has had snippets of Bob to the Oil for months but all from non-reputable sources so no substance to it.

Nice trade posts over the past week or so by the way.

Shame re limited response.

Heheh.....I'd love to see Bobrovsky go to Edmonton. He's been a very hot and cold goaltender his entire career. For a while it felt like on/off season to season. When he landed in Florida he seemed to settle down, but if you look at his numbers going back to 2019-20 he has had 4 of 7 seasons with a GAA over 2.9 (thrice upwards of 3.00), and his SV% has not been world class either. The Cats played a very complete team game in front of him in their 3 seasons that they went all the way to the Finals.

Bobs in Edmonton on an overpayment would make my day.....behind that team, at his age (he will be 38 when the puck drops this fall), I could see him retiring next summer.

As for lack of responses, two factors.....

1. It's the off-season and trades have been talked to death.

2. I posted too many consecutively so easy to miss when the first reply (Corn iirc) was on the next page sans quote.

[Lancer]

I don't really have a strong view as to whether this is good or bad for the NHL. The knee jerk reaction is that it is bad for every player to want to go to Florida or Vegas, but why shouldn't the spoils go the the winners? Why should the losers, the poorly run teams, the dysfunctional locker rooms and franchises, why should they be entitled to hold on to the players who are there because of the draft.

Hence Unrestricted Free Agency being where it is. One thing the league's salary cap did was add parity - and the game has never looked back. For all the romanticism of dynasties and fan jerk-off fantasies of 'super-teams' like the NBA Heat and Lakers, parity has been better for league and player revenues.

That said...

Last point, I note that full NMCs/NTCs are really a foot in the door for players to exercise extraordinary leverage, and that teams haven't been appropriately pricing in the costs of these clauses. Or that they will now at least start to reprice them.

Ottawa was negligent in giving Tkachuk the NMC. Any reasonable person would know he was always a flight risk.

I agree; clubs are going to be more picky about who they identify as their core and even pickier as to who they dole out those clauses to in negotiations. What Allvin did in giving Pettersson that contract and then expecting the Dickless Swede to live up to it is as lamentable as Dorion giving the same to Tkachuk. At least Dorion's mistake is over with.

[Meds]

Last point, I note that full NMCs/NTCs are really a foot in the door for players to exercise extraordinary leverage, and that teams haven't been appropriately pricing in the costs of these clauses. Or that they will now at least start to reprice them.

Ottawa was negligent in giving Tkachuk the NMC. Any reasonable person would know he was always a flight risk.

While I agree that Brady was likely always a flight risk, when you hear the frustration from him at the end of this season when asked about wanting out, he directly dumped it on the media telling them that he has never said that and that it has been a huge distraction for him having that question asked repeatedly by the media (and fans who buy into the media's rumour mongering). How much of the Canadian fanaticism surrounding their teams drives players out of the market?

Ask yourself: Where would you rather play, in a Canadian market where the fans are all about the team, but also hyper critical and constantly talking about the players performance and personal lives, or in an American market where there are NBA, NFL, and MLB, teams that scatter the spotlight and let you fly under the radar at times?

Granted, I don't live in the US, so I can only speculate based upon what I read, but maybe UW or Corn can speak to this.....are superstars in other sports as scrutinized by fans to the same level as hockey players in Canada?

I agree; clubs are going to be more picky about who they identify as their core and even pickier as to who they dole out those clauses to in negotiations. What Allvin did in giving Pettersson that contract and then expecting the Dickless Swede to live up to it is as lamentable as Dorion giving the same to Tkachuk. At least Dorion's mistake is over with.

I'm shocked that the league (owners) has not demanded that NTC/NMC be severely limited. Like max 3 (no matter the clauses).

[Meds]

Last point, I note that full NMCs/NTCs are really a foot in the door for players to exercise extraordinary leverage, and that teams haven't been appropriately pricing in the costs of these clauses. Or that they will now at least start to reprice them.

I wonder what they will be worth.....

The leverage is indeed wild.

I don't think that the league needs to regulate them too much beyond a total limit. You wanna save AAV as a GM/owner by tying your own hands in the future, fill your boots.....you then deal with the fallout if they player decides he wants to test free agency. The player agreeing to waive his NMC to anywhere is doing the team a solid.

The only regulation I would put in place would be a hard rule in the CBA (one that cannot be circumvented or done away with by mutual waiver) which voids the clause if the player requests a trade. Or at the very least forces expansion of the clause. If a player has a full NTC/NMC then he has to submit a list that includes 50% of the teams in the league. If the player has a partial NTC, then his list has to expand by a percentage of that clause (to greater than 50% of the league).

I also think that contracts should be somewhat subject to review. Say a player signs on for max term and a jackpot salary. If his production then goes into the shitter and stays there for 2 seasons, the team should have recourse to take the contract to arbitration to have it adjusted.

[Kenji]

This new NBA-esque situation of superstars forcing trades seems like a superstar thing not an American thing. When Bédard and Celebrini force their way to Vancouver we’re gonna be ok with it

[Topper]

Cock of the Crack Shack

[UWSaint]

The only regulation I would put in place would be a hard rule in the CBA (one that cannot be circumvented or done away with by mutual waiver) which voids the clause if the player requests a trade. Or at the very least forces expansion of the clause. If a player has a full NTC/NMC then he has to submit a list that includes 50% of the teams in the league. If the player has a partial NTC, then his list has to expand by a percentage of that clause (to greater than 50% of the league).

I like the void for one void for all (or void for half) idea in theory, but it would be difficult to apply because if the trigger is "player requests trade," they fall short of requesting the trade but more or less force the team's hand into asking them to waive the NTC for a transaction. In other words, less Dylan Larkin and more (what we understand was) JT Miller.

But at the end of the day, teams currently have it fully within their power to never find themselves in this situation simply by not negotiating full NMC/NTC clauses, and those who did not exercise this discipline "got the player they wanted" and still found themselves over a barrel. A team's management is bad when their moves are being dictated by people outside the management group....

Another interesting tweak for discussion would be to allow players and club's to negotiate conditions for a trade that go beyond a NTC. For example, imagine a condition that *if* traded, the trading team *must* retain 20% or more of the player's salary. This provides a disincentive to make the trade (making it more likely that a player who wants to stay will stay), but doesn't completely tie a team's hands. There is always going to be a hazard of a player quitting on the team and demanding out, but retaining $2M for 5 years may leave the trading team in a far better position than a market of 1 scenario.

I also think that contracts should be somewhat subject to review. Say a player signs on for max term and a jackpot salary. If his production then goes into the shitter and stays there for 2 seasons, the team should have recourse to take the contract to arbitration to have it adjusted.

The downside risk this proposal attempts to mitigate is the same risk as is addressed by the buyout provisions. It of course reweighs the team/player balance in the team's favor by allowing the team to have their cake and eat it too. I also think this further undermines the "guaranteed" nature of NHL contracts (which will have additional downstream effects) and rewards bad management -- those who lock up the wrong players to long term contracts. And if the purpose of this provision was to align long term contracts with performance, would we give the players the right to force arbitration when they overperform?

I think you can always teak the buyout rules to make getting rid of albatross contracts easier or have less of an impact on the future. But I am not really sure what problem we are trying to address here. From the owners' perspective, I think the CBA is substantively about owner security (profits are better secured by caps (no "race to the bottom"); the parity created by a cap that actually is at a level most teams would spend to is both a talking point and marginally improves the product (though not without tradeoffs), an improved product and (mostly) guaranteed profit means skyrocketing franchise valuations). From the player's perspective, they are mostly just trying to get as much of that pie as they can and what they can't have in the pie, they negotiate provisions geared towards established player (NHLPA member...) self-determination (which is why UFAs got younger).

I don't see the potential of individual teams having an easier time getting rid of individual "bad contracts" having a material structural impact that affects a majority of owners' ability to make money and increase valuations. Yes, some teams who enter into these deals will have their bottom lines impacted by making it more difficult for them to be competitive, declining fan interest, etc. But other owners *benefit* from having a couple division rivals burdened by albatrosses, and collectively? I'm not seeing a major problem in the status quo. And this is looking at it from the perspective of the *owners* who would be the intended beneficiaries of changes that would allow them to get out of bad contracts. The players, I would think, would be opposed to these kinds of changes, and they'd want something for it that is likely to exceed the benefits to the owners of a tweak.

At least that's my first impression.

[UWSaint]

Granted, I don't live in the US, so I can only speculate based upon what I read, but maybe UW or Corn can speak to this.....are superstars in other sports as scrutinized by fans to the same level as hockey players in Canada?

That's a hard one. I would say that *for the most part* US fans are slower to turn on their stars for performance reasons. I've certainly seen them turn, but it tends to take a little longer. I am speaking in very broad generalities here, but there seems a bit more celebrity worship in the US -- which tends to exaggerate the positive attributes of athletes on the field. I also think that "celebrity" nature of athletes in the US means that of the attention US superstars get is celebrity attention, not sports attention. We hear more about Aaron Rodgers and his girlfriends or drug-fueled meditations than the fact he's now immobile on the field, and that while he was never a scrambler, he was athletic and was pretty good at not taking sacks. But I get the impression that the "gossip" about hockey players in Canadian media is more tied to the sport and team, and to the extent that its "standard" celebrity gossip its more about "how does this affect the player as a player" instead of "that dude's wife is smokin' and look how they've redecorated their house!"

But I am also a little in the dark, too, because I consume a lot of hockey media and a lot of that is Canadian media. I am more of a casual fan of other sports; really only football holds my attention for the regular season.

I also think as far as the Canadian media goes and whether the players can "deal with" the spotlight, there needs to be some reflection on the quality of the media. Is it that there's too much attention, too probing, or is it that there's a lot of people in the media that create BS stories, so much speculation (not identified as such), can't move on to the next topic, etc. I wonder if we aren't a little bit in the situation in the Canadian hockey media where the media isn't just covering hockey stories, but becoming part of or *changing* the story by their actions. They are used to launder information and disinformation -- pawns to the organizations and their sources. They create the narratives and then try to prove their existence, and sometimes in doing so, create their existence.

And then there's a feedback loop dynamic. Owners/managers of Canadian clubs appear to do things in response to the media (or their fan base) that the same ownership/management group wouldn't do in, say Utah.

At the end of the day, 21.8% of the teams in the NHL are located in Canada. No Canadian team has won the cup in 33 years. The odds of this *randomly* happening if you assume all teams have an equal chance of winning the cup is about .06% or .07%. That .06 is not a typo -- that's 6 *hundredths* of *a* percent.

To be sure, a little of that is bad luck. But of the 8 or 9 times or so that a Canadian team has been in the Cup finals in that time, I don't think any team other than the Sedin-led Canucks went into the finals as a marginally better team. And even if Canadian teams had won 4 Cups in 33 years, that's still barely over half the "expected" Cups assuming all else is equal. Something is wrong.

This record of Canadian teams being unable to win the Cup for so long, is unlikely to be an accident, unlikely to be the product of randomness alone. There is SOMETHING about Canadian markets that make winning it all more difficult. The media poo poos it could be them, but I think its a plausible contributing factor.....

[Lancer]

This new NBA-esque situation of superstars forcing trades seems like a superstar thing not an American thing. When Bédard and Celebrini force their way to Vancouver we’re gonna be ok with it

Unless and until they do, the moves made are our only true contemporary reference on the matter. Whatever anyone can say about true motivations, the optics will speak enough to the many who aren’t in the know - regardless how accurate they are. American stars are flight risks in Canadian markets and NMCs should only be handed out to the likes of the Crosbys, Ovechkins and Sedins - players who stuck their roots in their market. Folks can make whatever points shifting blame from American players to incompetent management in Canadian markets - and they may well be right - but that matters only so much in the minds of people who pay the bills.

Again, until and unless RJ and the Twins roll out a lightning-speed rebuild that has them regularly in conference or Stanley Cup Finals by the time the likes of Buium gets within telescopic sight of UFA status, they had best have a plan to decisively move him the second he shows a whiff of wavering.

[UWSaint]

American stars are flight risks in Canadian markets and NMCs should only be handed out to the likes of the Crosbys, Ovechkins and Sedins - players who stuck their roots in their market. Folks can make whatever points shifting blame from American players to incompetent management in Canadian markets - and they may well be right - but that matters only so much in the minds of people who pay the bills.

What does the part I bolded mean? What's "that"? Incompetent management? And who do you mean by "paying the bills" Owners? Fans?

The competence of management is *huge*. Most of these players are leaving to have a better chance at winning the Cup. Building a Cup contender is the best way to be able to keep the players you want. The other thing is money. Some great players will always leave to win, some great players will leave if they aren't getting paid enough. A few will leave for family/personal reasons (closer to home or the wife's home), but that's generally not just a Canada/US thing, and its generally more localized than that. To be sure, no Americans choose the Canadian Pacific (or mountain) for these reasons because they aren't from there, and no Europeans have the "closer to home" option. But I don't think a kid from Michigan is differently situated on this score than a kid from Toronto.

And to be sure, players will leave if they really don't like the city they play in or its culture. I've seen plenty of posts here criticizing the cities of Winnipeg and Calgary and Edmonton. Are US players been particularly critical of the city of Vancouver? I've never heard that.

And look at the players you named. They became committed to teams who were good, and moving in the right direction. By the time things went bumpy for their organizations, in Ovechkin's and Crosby's case, they had won the Cup. The Sedins are a more unique case (being the players who didn't win the Cup and who were loyal to a Canadian team). But they went all the way to free agency the first time they had a chance to; signed on July 1. The Canucks won the division the prior year. The future was looking bright, but they didn't sign earlier because they were doing diligence on the new management and visa versa. They were always going as a package. It was a tight cap era. I agree they committed themselves to the organization--but they walked it to the line. And when the signed their next contract, their loyalty to the organization inspired a return loyalty that in turn prevented the team from using its best assets to boost a rebuild. Loyalty gives, and loyalty takes.

Its funny, I thought M Tkachuk did the Flames a solid by telling them he had no interest in signing after his deal was done. I'm sure if they had kept him, he would have played hard. If you are cynical, then you still buy this because it would have been a contract year. The same for Hughes -- he didn't demand a trade, he said, look, I have no intention on re-signing. The teams had the benefit of the bargain (both of these guys were moved without trade protection).

All that's a little different than Larkin. A *Michigan* guy demanding a trade from a *Michigan* team that seems to always be moving in the wrong direction.

[Aaronp18]

Calgary picked up Simon Nemec and Maxim Tsyplakov.

Heading to NJ is Etienne Morin, Second-round pick (2026), First-round pick (2027, top-10 protected), First-round pick (2028, top-10 protected)