Quote:
Originally Posted by ForeverFlameFan
Adam Fox and Matthew Coronato are two different people. Just because they will or have gone to Harvard at some point in their life doesn’t mean that they’ve got the same mentality.
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I think a fair number of fans sometimes forget that hockey players actually have a mentality. We keep hearing things like this: ‘Joe Bftsplk signed a UFA contract with the Banff Fighting Squirrels for only X dollars. We could have offered him more! Fire our GM!’ —Talking as if free agency is an auction, and each player is compelled to go to the highest bidder. No, sport, that's not what ‘free’ means.
Or the ever popular, ‘Banff traded Joe Bftsplk to the Harrisburg Squonks for a second-round pick and Player X. We could have offered our second and Player Y! That's totally a better deal! Fire our GM!’ —Talking as if all teams are in the same circumstances and all GMs must have the same assessment of players' relative values. Maybe the Harrisburg guy legitimately prefers Player X to Player Y. Maybe he is a bigot who thinks Y's breath stinks because he had a grandparent who ate garlic sausage. Who knows? What we do know is that our GM had no way of forcing Harrisburg
not to make that trade with Banff.
Assuming that all college-bound players, or even all Harvard-bound players, want exactly the same thing and will go exactly the same way about getting it? That's another form of the same malady.