When Alfie left I blamed him full out. Then, when the few details about the contract negotiation that we actually have came out, I split the blame although probably more goes onto Melnyk's side.
As I see it, the team tried to lowball Alfie. That could just be a part of contract negotiations, I suppose, but when you are a couple of million out it is hard for the other side to take you seriously. I believed the team was convinced he would never leave, which made them think they could get away with paying him below his value. Using that type of leverage is bush league, as Bonk put it. To their credit, the team learned from this and signed several players to very fair (and full value) contracts this past summer.
I shove some blame onto Alfie's side because I am convinced that he was motivated at least in part by pride and pettiness. When he saw the original offer from the Sens, and when it was clear that the team was not going to pay extra to "top up" the difference from the cap circumvention years from the previous contract, he walked out the door rather than entering into a real negotiation. To borrow the phrase from the previous paragraph, what he did was bush league. He is a grownup and a professional, not a petulant 7 year old.
Both sides won in the short term but lost in the bigger picture. Alfie got his cash and had the chance to play with some of his Olympic teammates. Speaking of which, he was added to the Swedish Olympic roster after being initially left out (if memory serves me right). However, fairly or unfairly, his legacy is now questioned a bit in ways that would never have occurred had he stayed with the Sens for the last season of his career.
The team won in the short and even medium term by rolling the budget dollars they would have paid to Alfie into another player. The common scenario floated is that it allowed the team to trade for Ryan, although it is also possible that it allowed the team to sign MacArthur. It doesn't matter. Either way, had Alfie signed the team could not have added both under their shoestring budget that season. In the bigger picture, the brand of the team (which is everything), suffered huge amounts of damage. The fiasco fed into the brewing perception that the team was cheap and not committed to winning. Now, in the second season after Alfie leaving, the team is just starting to win back some of the pile of good will from fans that was lost. When merchandise, tickets, etc are all factored in I am pretty sure that the team lost more revenue than the dollar figures difference between what they offered Alfie and what he would have signed for. Just a guess though, because the true dollar figures from some of those revenue streams are not public knowledge.
Both sides won a bit and lost a lot. My hope is that both sides decide to put it all behind them and just move forward. A big part of that would be for the team to be included in whatever retirement stuff happens once Alfie makes his announcement. A second part of that would be to re-integrate Alfie into the team and into our community by offering him some type of position.
