Guru Tugginmypuddah
Active member
I wonder how guys like Kadri and Rielly feel about their deals now.
Leafs @ Hurricanes - Nov. 21st, 7:00pm - SN, Fan 590
- Thread starter CarltonTheBear
- Start date
Kin
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Guru Tugginmypuddah said:
My hunch is they don't really care. They're focused on hockey and they have enough money to effectively do whatever they want, live wherever they choose and have the various things they want.
When guys are pending free agents I think they want a deal that establishes themselves within a pecking order as a reflection of how they see their own talents with the side benefit of setting them up for life but the idea that they're particularly driven by the sort of retirement planning(and the difference between 20 and 30 or 40 million) strikes me as unlikely.
Guru Tugginmypuddah
Active member
Nik the Trik said:
So, we can pretend that the Nylander situation exists in a vacuum, but the other thing I wonder is how do the rest of the Leafs, and even other players on other teams view Nylanders tactics.
Kin
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Guru Tugginmypuddah said:
Again, my hunch is nobody really cares. I think most players understand the nature of salary negotiations to the extent that they read what Nylander is doing as more or less what they'd do(establishing himself in a pecking order, not necessarily holding out) that they're more focused on their own stuff and see it as just part of the business.
I think that believing players would really think too much about this drastically underestimates how self-involved most of them tend to be while assuming that they tend to be fairly naive about the business they're in. I mean, I could say that what Nylander's doing is net good for most players as players setting new salary benchmarks rises the tide for all but even that I think is putting more thought into these things than most players do.
Phileas Fogg
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Guru Tugginmypuddah said:
I think a lot of players on other teams are likely very supportive (like Kucherov's comments) - for a variety of reasons, some altruistic, and some not so much.
On the Leafs - I think most likely separate Nylander from this process, which is likely dominated by his father and his agent, and pretty much focus on hockey.
Frank E
Active member
Nik the Trik said:
This is not how I see things at all. If they feel they took discounts to put a winning team together at the behest of management, then they wouldn't be too happy about Nylander getting the money that they left on the table.
You can keep saying "well, they have millions, so why would they care?", but that statement has been proven wrong historically a thousand times. If they feel as though they're worth just as much as the guy sitting beside them, they're not happy if they're not getting paid the same, just like anyone in any workplace.
Frank E said:
I'm not really sure we could say that they took discounts on those deals, at least not really any significant ones. We were all pretty thrilled at the contracts and knew they had potential to be steals later on down the road, but there were pretty much the market rate at the time for long-term deals.
And if they were less than what they maybe could have got that had more to do with the fact that they played their entire careers at that point on dog-crap teams so that deflated their stats/value.
Frank E said:
I don't think either of them left money on the the table. Thier contracts were around market value at the time, they both opted for the security of a long term deal.
Kadri could have filed for arbitration or accepted his qualifying offer if he wanted to bet on himself improving and being worth a bigger contract. He was coming of 39 and 45 point seasons so he wasn't going to get much more than he got on a long term deal.
Kin
New member
Frank E said:
As Carlton and Deebo have pointed out, neither Kadri nor Rielly really have just cause to think they "took discounts" but even beyond that I think that people who do "take discounts" to build a winning team end up caring less about where that money goes than whether or not the team, you know, wins.
Frank E said:
What I'm saying is "hockey players are relatively simple folk so they tend to be fairly contented with their contracts so long as all of their whims are seen to" and I don't think that has "been proven wrong historically" a thousand times as hockey players making this kind of money is a fairly recent thing and as someone with a pretty good grasp on the recent history of the game I can say that there aren't too many examples of players who are under contract getting very upset by the terms of those contracts. The closest you could come to that is maybe Radulov but even then he didn't start resenting his teammates, he just signed elsewhere.
Frank E said:
Well, no. It's not like any other workplace. That's just nonsense. A guy making 50k who is prevented from doing many of the things he wants because of his salary and who credibly believes his life would be significantly different if he was making more would have cause to resent a less qualified person making 70k in an entirely different way than someone making 5 million dollars a year, whose every fantasy can become a reality with a snap of their fingers, might feel about a less qualified person making slightly more. You're talking about someone facing genuine hardships in their life vs. just a case of pure avarice.
Most people, I think, would actually not be obsessed with money if all of their financial needs were met. I get that there are a small subset of B-school morons who quote Boiler Room to each other, believe that the pursuit of wealth justifies them doing immoral things and think they're ultimately defined by their net worth(see 2008, causes of) but as much as they like to justify their being complete and total worthless chodes by saying they're like other people, they're really not. Most people would be happy just to make ends meet.
Every hockey player in the league has to deal with the way the current CBA artificially restricts what certain player makes. Guys on ELC, no matter how they play, make less than other guys. Then their bargaining power is restricted when they're RFAs. Being paid less than someone else regardless of who is better than who is a feature of the system, not a bug. If players took it personally then the angriest players in the world would be the best young players in the world. But they're not because most of them are pretty happy to be making millions of dollars.
Frank E
Active member
Just to be clear, I said "IF" they feel they took a discount, they'd likely not want the money they left on the table to be given to Nylander because he didn't want to take a discount. I don't know if they were asked to take a little less, like Yzerman asks.
And I'm not sure what to tell you, but there plenty of very wealthy and successful people that still work full-time every day trying to make more money to get richer. What can drive them is their legacy, to ensure their kids and grandchildren never have to want for anything.
Suggesting that hockey players whose competitiveness is what made them into professional wealthy athletes all of a sudden aren't competitive when it comes to salary rankings among their peers and future earnings is bananas.
And I'm not sure what to tell you, but there plenty of very wealthy and successful people that still work full-time every day trying to make more money to get richer. What can drive them is their legacy, to ensure their kids and grandchildren never have to want for anything.
Suggesting that hockey players whose competitiveness is what made them into professional wealthy athletes all of a sudden aren't competitive when it comes to salary rankings among their peers and future earnings is bananas.
Kin
New member
Frank E said:
That has nothing to do with what you brought up. You suggested that some guys in their mid-20's making millions of dollars would burn with resentment if someone else was, in their view, making more than them unjustifiably. Nobody is suggesting that Kadri or Rielly are going to stop playing hockey despite already having made millions.
Frank E said:
That's terrific Mr. Gecko but that's literally the opposite of what I said. I said pretty clearly that players wanting to negotiate their contract to establish their place among a pecking order and players caring about that, rather than money, is why these negotiations can be as contentious as we're seeing they can be. I just think that once they sign their big money contracts they then don't get upset at the contracts other people sign.
And for what it's worth I've always thought that it was being good at hockey that made these guys wealthy athletes.
Kin
New member
Oh yeah and:
We don't know if they were asked to take less but as pointed out, there's no actual reason to think that if they were asked to take less that they actually did. Both guys got deals that were pretty fair based on the resumes they'd built to date. If Rielly had been looking for more than 5 per and Kadri for more than 4.25 than it's less likely that Lamoriello would have urged them to take less for the good of the team than it is that he'd say they actually hadn't earned more than that.
Which is to say nothing of the fact that I don't buy for a second that "take less for the good of the team" is a pitch anyone makes to guys on terrible teams with tons of cap sapce which is the case in both of those deals.
Frank E said:
We don't know if they were asked to take less but as pointed out, there's no actual reason to think that if they were asked to take less that they actually did. Both guys got deals that were pretty fair based on the resumes they'd built to date. If Rielly had been looking for more than 5 per and Kadri for more than 4.25 than it's less likely that Lamoriello would have urged them to take less for the good of the team than it is that he'd say they actually hadn't earned more than that.
Which is to say nothing of the fact that I don't buy for a second that "take less for the good of the team" is a pitch anyone makes to guys on terrible teams with tons of cap sapce which is the case in both of those deals.