Quote:
Originally Posted by Tinordi
Ruthless is the future. Hockey is probably the deepest ingrained of the old boys, honor bound, do right by my people attitude but that type of sentimentality gets you nothing in a salary cap league.
I've been saying this for years but the model is the NFL where ruthlessness reigns. You simply don't have the room for sentimentality when you're governed by an uncompromising hard call in a zero sum league. Either you have players performing over or under the value of their contract and the teams with the best ratio of those players are the ones who contend.
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Yep. The cap climate has hardened to the point that a couple bad contracts are enough to scupper a team's fortunes - and a GM's career. We're going to see more and more teams let players just walk instead of giving in to their demands for salary or ice time. And the strong teams will survive these losses because they'll have the drafting, development, and coaching in place. A lot of people hate them, but the NE Patriots have written the textbook on how to manage personnel in a league with a hard salary cap.