Brian Burke, Kevin Lowe and Valtteri Filppula
You know it’s summer when the big news in the NHL is the persistent girlfight between Brian Burke and Kevin Lowe. Lowe has managed to stay above the fray for the most part, basically telling the Anaheim GM to:
Apparently Lowe had enough with the latest outburst and responded by calling Burke a moron. Fortunately he didn’t say that “Burkie” dresses like a skank or we would have had a purse fight on our hands.
If Burke would have simply said offer sheets for your restricted free agents fucking suck [this is Burke after all] then he’d have had a pretty symathetic audience. But his continued attacks on Lowe are entertainment worthy of Jerry Springer at their best and more than a bit embarrassing at their worst.
GM fights are like midget fights: funny but also kinda disturbing
Burke has commented that moves like the offer sheets Lowe proffered to Tomas Vanek and then Dustin Penner have removed a second reasonable contract before a player really hits the prime of his earning years. The most obvious response to that is that exceptional talents like Sid Crosby, Evgeni Malkin and Alexander Ovechkin were going to be paid large sums of money due to their high level of production.
| Player | Age | Salary |
|
Sid Crosby |
20 | $9 million |
|
Evgeni Malkin |
21 | $9 million |
|
Alexander Ovechkin |
22 | $9 million |
The three players in the chart above averaged right around 100 points each and that was with Crosby missing nearly half the season. Combined they averaged 1.33 points per game. I would argue that the majority of the talent [well, other than Toronto] - regardless of which contract they are playing under - are reasonably compensated for their production. My guess is there are minor amounts of players at either end of the bell curve: some who are grossly underpaid [Henrik Zetterberg, Evgeni Malkin playing on an entry-level contract last season] and some who are grossly overpaid [Thomas Vanek and Todd Bertuzzi].
If anyone should be bitching I’d argue it should be Sabres general manager Darcy Reiger due to the awful offer sheet Lowe put out to Thomas Vanek. Vanek made $10 million last season and produced a grand total of 64 points. This was a case where the offer sheet was poisonous and unfortunately Buffalo, a team that had been just decimated by the departure of UFAs like Chris Drury and Daniel Briere, felt they had to match Edmonton’s offer.
But there are two problems with this line of criticism. The first is the criticism that the team that puts out the offer sheet overvalues the player they are trying to sign. Want a one-word rebuttal?: duh. Going into a little more detail, the RFA offer sheet is something that is very seldom used and is still a bit taboo, although it appears it will become more common under the current CBA and hard salary cap. At least one has been offered thus far, as Vancouver general manager Mike Gillis threw one at David Backes that the St. Louis Blues quickly matched.
Vancouver didn’t want to throw away a potential shot at John Tavares
The Canucks probably tempered their offer as they didn’t want to lose their first round draft in next year’s draft which - unfortunately for the Nuck faithful - looks like it could be a pretty high draft pick. But if you are going to go the RFA offer sheet route and make a run at a player, you are forced to overvalue the player in order to make an offer that will not be matched. The only way around this is if a team is right up against the cap or slightly over the cap [or their budget for the year] and cannot match a more reasonable offer.
So yeah, the RFA offer sheet is almost guaranteed to overvalue the player it targets if it has any chance at being successful. It’s about as straight-forward as saying the best talent in the league is going to be paid as such as early as their second contract.
The other problem with this argument is that Burke was entirely capable of protecting his investment in Dustin Penner. All he had to do was file for salary arbitration and it would have prevented any other team from putting out an offer sheet to Penner.
There were rumors yesterday that the Canucks were preparing to send an offer sheet Valtteri Filppula’s way. Filppula apparently decided he wanted no part of the lovely Pacific Northwest and promptly told his agent to file for salary arbitration.
Penner signed a two-year entry contract with Anaheim on May 12, 2004 at the age of 22. The CBA dictates that he became a RFA after that contract ended. All Anaheim had to do to protect their investment was make a qualifying offer by July 1st and then either the club or Penner could file for salary arbitration.
My guess is Burke’s bluster is designed to deflect attention from the fact he could have very easily prevented the offer sheet to Penner. The Ducks could have certainly used Penner’s 23 goals last season, and if Burke had simply filed for salary arbitration he could have had them for much less than $4.25 million per season.
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