Quoting: F50marco
and they are literally right up to the cap at that point......... forget trade deadline acquisitions. Forget easy call ups when injuries happen. But more importantly and you agreed with me on this, what about next year? How much is Suzuki getting now? What happens when KK scores 41 points and demands 6M+ again next year?
IF KK signed an offer sheet on July 1st, I'd be wayyyyy more forgiving. The team had cap space, Danault wasn't coming back, etc. etc. After the team signs a bunch of players and training camp starts in a month? That put the team in a bind gong forward that they shouldn't have had to be in and didn't plan for.
The ramifications of this are far deeper than you think. The timing was terrible.
So what i'm going to say about this whole situation comes from a vaguely different perspective, and it is not particularly meant to be a "well, you're wrong, and here's why" sort of deal. But my take on this whole thing devolves into two related but semi-distinct points:
1) Jesperi Kotkaniemi should really be trying to make as much money as he can, at the end of the day, because the team he plays for is certainly going to try and bilk him out of as much of it as they think they can get away with.
It's that sort of line of thinking, that players need to pay their dues before they can make it big, that led to this current system of restricted free agency, along with this nebulous idea that a team and the players that play for it are one big happy family. Hockey is still a
business, at the end of the day, and young players get the short end of the stick for hand-wavy intangible reasons that are frankly kinda dumb. You see the extreme end of this in the NFL, with non-guaranteed contracts and running backs that last, like, a few years before injuries and concussions ruin their careers. NFL players have to make as much money as they can with the short playing window that they have. Hockey players frankly should be doing the same thing, because who knows how long their window of opportunity will last to make it big in the NHL.
On top of that, the pandemic has really made it plainly obvious that sports leagues and sports team owners have a severe disdain for anything that is not
making money, up to and including the health and safety of their players. Again, you see the extreme end of this in the NFL, where, last season, an entire
fifth (as in, 20%) of the league's players wound up on the COVID-19 injury reserve list. Sports teams very much see their players as commodities as opposed to human beings, and, as much as hockey fans might not like to think it, this extends to the NHL, too. Frankly, I think this means that, conversely, players should have a more detached view of their attachment to a team, as well.
$6.1M is a
lot of money, and definitely more than the 2-year, $2.5M AAV contract that had supposedly been extended to Kotkaniemi, per Elliotte Friedman; on top of that, Friedman said on the 31 Thoughts podcast that he's fairly certain that the Hurricanes have already discussed what a long-term contract would look like with Kotkaniemi and his agent, making it look like they've done their due diligence. Arpon Basu's reporting in The Athletic also seems to imply that Kotkaniemi, at one point, thought he would be getting a long-term extension from the Habs, but that that thinking changed. This sorta leads into my second point:
2) I think the relationship between Kotkaniemi and the Habs really badly deteriorated, but that it wasn't
just on Kotkaniemi's end, and he thinks the Habs have done
him dirty in some number of ways. I think Basu's reporting sums up this situation far better than I can, so I'll just drop a couple of quotes from the article he wrote about it:
Quote:
Last season, Kotkaniemi struggled to find consistency, but it should be noted he didn’t benefit from any consistency either in terms of linemates or role. He was 20, remember, and while some would argue the onus was on him to make the best of his situation – it’s a fair argument – it could just as easily be argued the Canadiens did not put him in a situation to succeed.
Then the playoffs began and Kotkaniemi was a healthy scratch. When they ended roughly six weeks later in the Stanley Cup Final, Kotkaniemi was again a healthy scratch. He played a bunch of games in between, 19 to be precise, and produced eight points. He didn’t exactly set the world on fire, but he also turned 21 the day before the Canadiens lost in the Final with him watching from the stands in Tampa.
And then, once the playoffs were over, Kotkaniemi heard his general manager say this: “If I don’t have a choice, if I don’t see there’s a fit, then I’m going to have to rely and hope that KK gets the job done. That’s just the reality of being a GM in the National Hockey League. Sometimes, you can’t fill those spots, you have to be careful, and if it’s not there, you hope the young player’s going to take the next step. I don’t know that for sure, but that might have to be the case with KK.”
Quote:
The Hurricanes’ motives here are not purely hockey-related, but when they made that offer to Kotkaniemi, they showed more belief in him than the Canadiens had shown in nearly two years. His own GM told the world that the worst-case scenario for his team would be to settle on having Kotkaniemi be its second-line centre this season. So for those who were offended by the fact Kotkaniemi agreed to a contract that was so obviously an attempt to troll the Canadiens – with a base salary of $6,100,015 and a signing bonus of $20 as a way of getting both Kotkaniemi’s and Aho’s jersey numbers in the offer – perhaps Kotkaniemi was in a headspace where trolling the Canadiens was not all that disagreeable to him.
As an aside (and this is more of a point 2a), I'm not particularly willing to extend any goodwill to Marc Bergevin in consideration of this situation, considering how recent events have played out and how he's handled them.