Quote:
Originally Posted by Jay Random
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 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.
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Yup, I'm sure it's universal but we have a large contingent of fans here that collectively seem to think our GM gets first refusal for every free agent and every trade.