Swooning? Please. Look at my post history. I've been more than critical of Kopitar over the years. Condescending horse**** like that is exactly what exposes your agenda here as an anti-player corporate shill.
I'm not talking about the stagnant cap. I'm talking about a set market on a player of Kopitar's value. You can keep pretending like it doesn't exist, but in a negotiation, it very much does. The cap was smaller when Toews signed his deal. Toews and Kopitar have enjoyed virtually identical career paths. Cap projections are irrelevant in a contract negotiation, because like market projections, they're subject to change on a dime. And the player/agent can always point to three, four years down along the road and (rightfully) say, "we have no idea what the cap will be in the middle of this contract." This is exactly why first wave contracts are market setting in the 1-2 years they're relevant. Dean had absolutely no ground to stand on with, "well, the cap isn't going up."
But honestly, I was going to write a lot more here, and I'm now seeing that's pointless. You constantly pound this dreamland drum of hometown discounts and team-first yah yah stuff, which simply doesn't exist. No one is taking hometown discounts. It's absurd to suggest.
I don't know what tell you if you believe Kopitar has been anything less but an absolutely critical player for this team for eight years now. All the statistics are right there, and have been quoted for you several times now. And you keep turning them away because you thought Kopitar should be a nice guy and leave $20 million on the table. It's ridiculous. The PA is not going to let Kopitar do that. Kopitar's agent is not going let him do that. It's pure fantasy for you to suggest this was ever even on the table; it wasn't.
And if Dean Lombardi believed the team had a chance in hell at contending without Kopitar, he would have been traded already. To suggest otherwise is...it's really not worth getting infracted for, so I'll just say I vehemently disagree with that. Vehemently disagree. There is not a single available and cheaper center in the league who would have filled Kopitar's shoes any time in the next 3-4 years. You know it. I know it. And Dean knows it, too, hence the contract.
This is the last I'll say on the matter, because we're not going to see eye to eye here: Kopitar asking for as much as he could doesn't mean he "****ed" the Kings. It doesn't mean he's greedy, or selfish. It just means he's an employee trying to get paid what his peers are being paid. There's nothing Lombardi could have done here. You really can't reasonably expect Kopitar to shoulder the burden of Lombardi's self-created cap problems--cap problems which would have existed regardless of whether Kopitar signed for 8 million, or 10.
