Bruce Dowbiggin
Cash & Carey: Flames Salary Cap Shuffle Obscures Price Reduction
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The derring-do of Calgary Flames GM Brad Treliving has been justly noted the past week. Faced with losing two franchise players in Johnny Gaudreau and Matthew Tkachuk for nothing— while also balancing a precarious salary-cap crunch— Treliving turned the departures of the two 40-goal scorers into gold. He:
1) traded forward Tkachuk for Florida star winger Jonathan Huberdeau plus Top 4 defence man MacKenzie Weegar.
2) Extended Huberdeau, who tied Gaudreau with 115 points last year, for eight more years.
3) Dumped oft-injured centre Sean Monahan to Montreal, cutting his $6.375 annual cap hit
4) Thus freeing up cap space to sign free agent/ Stanley Cup winner Nazim Kadri for seven years.
5) Still has cap and depth to make more moves. Bookies now have the re-made Flames as favourites to repeat as Pacific Conference champions with a vastly overhauled roster.
Lost in this whirlwind shuffle was the news from Canadiens GM Kent Hughes that Montreal’s star goalie Carey Price was likely to miss most, or all, of next season with a bad knee. Habs fans certainly are devastated. Could it be the end for Price, whom many call the best goalie of the 2005 NHL Draft and his generation?
If he plays no more Price’s stat line is still impressive. 712 GP/ 361 wins/ 2.51 GAA/ 0.917 save percentage. In 2015 he ran the table with the Hart, Vezina and Lou Marsh Awards. Gold medal at the 2014 Olympics and 2016 World Cup. And, playing in Montreal always helps brush up your HOF resumé. In our book Inexact Science (ECM Press) we write, “While other players have certainly enjoyed more team success, few from 2005 have enjoyed the individual honours and respect from their peers and opponents that Carey Price has…”
But wait a minute on those claims of him being the uber-goalie. “While our re-draft of 2005 has Price going after Jonathan Quick, it’s a close race considering Quick has less individual hardware and has dropped off in recent years. (He rebounded with a stellar 2022 playoff series versus Edmonton in which Quick reached first place first place among American goaltenders in playoff shutouts.)
But Quick’s two Stanley Cups—especially his 2012 Conn Smythe Trophy showing—give him the edge as the most accomplished goalie from this particular draft year. Even if, arguably, his overall talent and technique are not superior to Price’s, his peak proved more productive, more significant and more legendary.
Plus, he had to fight to reach his esteemed position in the league after being an unheralded third-round pick seven years prior to his 2012 triumph. Let’s say he won the battle if not the PR war with Price.
Price, on the other hand, will have to rack up several appearances and wins for another few years before his Hall of Fame case becomes ironclad. That said, no one in their right hockey mind should argue that a goalie from that same draft, such as Tuukka Rask or Ben Bishop, would have been a better investment for Montreal. While those two have a combined three finals appearances to Price’s zero, their individual awards case isn’t quite as stocked either.”
What’s ironic is that, at the time of the 2005 Draft, NBC analyst Pierre McGuire sourly said of the Price selection, “This is not a fit for Montreal…” Canadiens fans and NHL followers in general were critical of the choice upon its announcement, given the team’s needs at that time. A minority of fans to this day feel the Habs would have been better off taking a strong two-way centre in Anze Kopitar. After all, goalies don’t have to be generational to lead a team to a Cup, whereas legendary centres don’t just fall off trees—something Montreal fans should be well aware of since the retirement of Jacques Lemaire in 1979…
As McGuire pointed out at the time, Montreal’s netminding inventory was already well stocked… as they owned former Vezina and Hart Trophy winner Jose Theodore plus future number one netminders Cristobal Huet (acquired that draft weekend from the Kings in return for backup and once heir-apparent Mathieu Garon) and Jaroslav Halak. But Montreal still lacked a goalie with the pedigree of a true franchise backstop, something Theodore had provided in glimpses between 1997 and 2004 but usually followed up with disappointing seasons
As it was, “Theo” hit the skids again after the Price selection, struggling badly enough to be traded away to the Avalanche for David Aebischer with just a month to go in the 2005–06 regular season. All of a sudden, Price went up a tick in the Habs’ goalie system. In the next year and change, Price would claim a World Junior gold medal, a Calder Cup and the American Hockey League playoff MVP award (Jack Butterfield Trophy). This was all accomplished less than two years after his selection, we might add. As teenage goalies go, it was a rise not seen since the days of Patrick Roy.
A few months after his AHL glory—and just a month after he turned 20—Price made the big club and then was crowned the starter leading up the 2008 playoffs. He has yet to lose control of the number one job since, all the while setting franchise records for the NHL team with perhaps the richest goaltending history of them all.
While he gets flak for their Cup-less years of frustration, one can point to the inequalities of the rest of the roster and poor goal support come playoff time as the more obvious culprits (for example, Price posted a 1.78 GAA in the 2020 playoffs, yet only sported a record of 5–5 because his team could barely generate more than two goals per game and were shut out twice along the way).”
Considering Price’s impact on the NHL only reinforces the scene-stealing performance by Treliving in re-tooling his team in a time of salary caps and free agency. Which headline will still be the biggest story in retrospect probably depends on the 2022-23 Flames season.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com). A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, he’s a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft YearsIn NHL History, , his new book with his son Evan, was voted the eighth best professional hockey book of by bookauthority.org . His 2004 book Money Players was voted seventh best, and is available via http://brucedowbigginbooks.ca/book-personalaccount.aspx
Bruce Dowbiggin
Hero Or Villain: How Chrystia Freeland Wears Both Masks
“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked. “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”
This Ernest Hemingway gem from The Sun Also Rises has gotten a workout in this time of progressive economic policy. But it’s worth repeating in the case of Justin Trudeau’s Canada where the F word is fiscal. The “gradually” part of Liberal fiscal policy has now passed. Leaving the “suddenly” of $60 B deficits with no plan for recovery
You’d think that missing your deficit estimate by $40B might have cost the finance minister Chrystia Freeland her job. But no! In Trudeaupia it was the failure of Freeland to embrace even more wack-a-doodle spending plans by the prime minister and his brain trust of former groomsmen and climate acolytes. Yes, the cratering of finances is the ideal time to award a GST holiday and $250 cheques to much of the nation. It has been noticed.
You know how Canadians are always bitter that America pays no attention to Canada? (Doug Ford appeared Tuesday on @CNN which identified him as Premier of “Ontaria”.) Well, the Collapse By The Canal in Ottawa has brought much attention to the nation. Specifically, president-elect Donald Trump, the Shecky Green of presidents, has noticed the chaos. ““The Great State of Canada is stunned as the Finance Minister resigns, or was fired, from her position by Governor Justin Trudeau,” Trump wrote, using his barb that Trudeau is not a PM but a lowly governor.
Adding for good measure, that Freeland’s “behavior was totally toxic, and not at all conducive to making deals which are good for the very unhappy citizens of Canada… She will not be missed!!!” Three exclamation points if you get that far.
Certainly no-one with a memory longer than two weeks will miss the deputy PM who gleefully wiped out the personal finances and freedoms of the Freedom Convoy truckers. Or the cabinet minister who promoted a standing O in the Commons for a former Nazi soldier. Or the senior government official who demanded legal restrictions against voters shouting at her in public.
Or the feminist who stood aside while her boss Trudeau expelled an indigenous female finance minister for allowing the RCMP to investigate PMJT’s nefarious activities on behalf of his donors. Or who… never mind. Just look up Blackface.
No, the current version of Freeland is the plucky woman who was fired on a Zoom call by a man. A woman of integrity who then sent off a stinging letter of resignation in which she revealed she was being pushed aside for a Trudeau buddy Mark Carney. A fiscal warrior who resisted going $60B in the red (she was cool at $40B, however). And, BTW, could she please deliver the government’s financial statement before she’s fired?
See how it works? She’s now a victim. “She didn’t just quit. She said ‘f**k you’ to Trudeau on the way out.” This is another case of somethingvblogger Melissa Chen calls Schrödinger’s Feminist, defined as a woman who is simultaneously a victim and empowered. Until something happens and she collapses into one of either states, whichever is politically expedient for her circumstance.
Chen expands on the notion. “A major component of the angst that characterizes much of the modern dynamics between men and women today comes down to the fact that women have demanded equal rights but also wish for preferred treatment.” A week’s viewing of The View will serve to illustrate this concept.
One of The View’s textbook cases of Schrödinger’s Feminist was Kamala Harris. The treatment of the defeated Democratic Party presidential candidate was guard-railed between her brave quest to become America’s first menstruating president and, on the other side, her victim status as a woman, the unfair way she was treated. It was enough to make Joy Behar’s head spin.
Forget that everyone in the mainstream media from pollsters to networks to Hollywood stars was all-in on Kamala as a “joyful “warrior. Even though they knew she was losing they cooked the polls the whole way for her. She was a victim, the kind Hillary Clinton meant when she said all women should be believed if they’re trying to destroy Justice Kavanaugh. Or, like serial fabulist E. Jean Carroll, waiting 30 years to bankrupt Trump and disqualify him from the presidential race, with a Law & Order script. How could a woman ever invent a story about getting trapped in a change room at Bergdorf Goodman with Trump?
Oh, Kamala played the brave front as she blundered to her record defeat. (Still called “a perfect campaign” by her apologists.) But underpinning it all was her status as a woman, a woman for whom her followers on The View demanded a double standard. In the end, only the Schrödinger feminists in the Dems coalition stayed loyal to Harris, (Kamala Harris Did A Good Job!) explaining away her failure to tell the world that Joe Biden was koo-koo for Coco Puffs as her innate decency.
And so Freeland, too, is being gifted with Schrödinger’s Feminism. Having Justin Trudeau, the Trust Fund twit, as your antagonist sure helps. So does the Woke media corps now in Ottawa painting sympathetic portraits of your sacrifice. Your dubious resumé since donning Liberal colours is forgotten. You will receive the get out of jail free card .
Hell, even the leader of the opposition will give you a tongue bath. “Instead of taking responsibility, the prime minister told her that she should take all the blame,” Pierre Poilievre said. “The good old boys in the back room would protect themselves and make the then-finance minister take all the blame.” Trudeau, who rejects bankers in favour of poets, will take the fall.
Which summons up this nugget from F. Scott Fitzgerald. “Life is a comedy for those who think and a tragedy for those who feel. Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.”
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, his new book Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed hockey is now available on Amazon. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his previous book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His 2004 book Money Players was voted sixth best on the same list, and is available via brucedowbigginbooks.ca.
Bruce Dowbiggin
MLB’s Exploding Chequebook: Parity Is Now For Suckers
MLB has seen parity and proclaimed, “We don’t give a damn!” Okay, they didn’t say that. In fact they insist the opposite is true. They’re all about competition and smaller markets getting a shot at a title. But as the 2024 offseason spending shows, believe none of what you hear and half of what you see in MLB.
Here’s the skinny: Juan Soto‘s contract with the NY Mets — 15 years and guaranteeing $765 million, not a penny of which is deferred. Max Fried signed an eight-year, $218 million deal with the New York Yankees. Later, Nathan Eovaldi secured a three-year, $75 million contract to return to the Texas Rangers. Blake Snell (five years, $182 million with the Los Angeles Dodgers) and Matthew Boyd (two years, $29 million with the Chicago Cubs) added to the splurge.
There’s one more thing that stands out. MLB has no trouble with the financial big boys in New York, Los Angles, Texas, Toronto, Atlanta and Chicago shelling out money no small market dare pay. In the MLB cheap seats, Tampa, Pittsburgh and Miami can’t send out quality players fast enough. But MLB is cool with that, too, as those paupers get a healthy slice of TV money.
So yes, they’re all about talking parity with their luxury tax system. But to keep the TV, digital, betting and marketing lucre flowing they have to have large media markets swinging the heaviest bats come postseason. The question is, do MLB fans care the way they used to about parity? It says here they don’t. More want to seed best-on-best more often. Which is brutal but refreshing.
Their sister leagues, married to draconian salary cap systems, are still pushing parity, even as they expand beyond recognition. In our 2004 book Money Players, legendary Boston Bruins coach/ GM Harry Sinden noted, “The problem with teams in the league, is that there were (then) 20 teams who all think they are going to win the Stanley Cup and they all are going to share it. But only one team is going to win it. The rest are chasing a rainbow.”
And that was before the expansion Vegas Golden Knights won a Cup within five years while the third-year Seattle Kraken made a run in those same 2023 playoffs. There are currently 32 teams in the league, each chasing Sinden’s rainbow of a Stanley Cup. That means 31 cranky fan bases every year. And 31 management teams trying to avoid getting fired.
Maybe we’ve reached peak franchise level? Uh, no. Not so long as salary-capped leagues can use the dream of parity to sell more franchises. As we wrote in October of 2023, “If you believe the innuendo coming from commissioner Gary Bettman there is a steady appetite for getting a piece of the NHL operation. “The best answer I can give you is that we have continuous expressions of interest from places like Houston, Atlanta, Quebec City, Salt Lake City, but expansion isn’t on the agenda.” In the next breath Bettman was predicting that any new teams will cost “A lot, a lot.”
Deputy commissioner Bill Daly echoed Bettman’s caution about a sudden expansion but added, ”Having said that, particularly with the success of the Vegas and Seattle expansions, there are more people who want to own professional hockey teams.” Translation: If the NHL can get a billion for a new team, the heck with competitive excellence, the clock might start ticking sooner. After all, small-market Ottawa just went for $950.”
It’s not just the expansion-obsessed NHL talking more teams. MLB is looking to add franchises. Abandoned Montreal is once more getting palpitations over rumours that the league wants to return to the city that lost its Expos in 2005. Recent reports indicate that while MLB might prefer Salt Lake City and Nashville it also feels it must right the wrong left when the Expos moved to Washington DC 19 years ago.
The city needs a new ballpark to replace disastrous Olympic Stadium. They’ll also need more than Tom Brady to fund the franchise fee and operating costs. And Quebec corporate support— always transitory in the Expos years— will need to be strong. But two more MLB franchises within five years is a lock.
While the NBA is mum on going past 30 teams it has not shut the door on expansion after seeing the NHL cashing in. Neither has the cash-generating monster known as the NFL where teams currently sell for over six billion US. The NFL is eyeing Europe for its next moves.
The question that has to be asked in this is, WTF, quality of competition? The more teams in a league the lower the chances of even getting to a semifinal series let alone a championship. Fans in cities starved for a championship— the NFL’s Detroit Lions or Cleveland Browns are entering their seventh decade without a title or the Toronto Maple Leafs title-less since 1967— know how corrosive it can be.
Getting to 34, 36, maybe 40 teams makes for a short-term score for owners, but it could leave leagues with an entire strata of loser teams that no one—least of all networks, carriers and advertisers—wants to see. Generations of fans will be like Canuck supporters, going their entire lives without a championship.
In addition, as we’ve argued in our 2018 book Cap In Hand: How Salary Caps Are Killing Pro Sports and How The Free Market Can Save Them, watering down the product with a lot of teams no one wants to watch nationally or globally seems counter productive. The move away from quality toward quantity serves only the gambling industry. But since when has Gary Bettman Truly cared about quality of the product? So long as he gets to say, “We have a trade to announce” at the Draft, he’s a happy guy.
When we published Cap In Hand we proposed a system like soccer with ranked divisions using promotion and relegation to ensure competition, not parity. Most of the interviewers we spoke to were skeptical of the idea. But as MLB steams closer to economic Darwinism our proposal is looking more credible every day. Play at the level you can afford. Or just watch Ted Lasso. Your choice.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, he’s a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. His new book Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed hockey is now available on Amazon. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his previous book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His 2004 book Money Players was voted sixth best on the same list, and is available via brucedowbigginbooks.ca.
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