To get to $8.5M with Aho, they had to let another team sign him.
I’ll believe they’d sign Meier after 25gms to a 9M aav contract when I see it.
I'll just copy and paste a reply I made to someone else on our forum a couple months ago. Take it for what you will.
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Aho signed the offer sheet on July 1st. Here's some of the 2019 RFAs who still weren't signed at that point (and the date that they eventually signed):
Mitch Marner (9/13),
Brayden Point (9/23),
Patrik Laine (9/27),
Mikko Rantanen (9/28),
Brock Boeser (9/16),
Matthew Tkachuk(9/25), and
Zach Werenski (9/9). Those other big name RFAs weren't signed by their teams until another 2.5 - 3 months
after Aho signed the offer sheet.
The
narrative is that The Borg was unreasonable and inflexible in negotiations with Aho. The reality is that unless someone has inside information unavailable to the rest of us, who knows how reasonably or unreasonably those negotiations would have actually played out? People use other Cane negotiations (Dougie, Trocheck, etc.) as indicators of the Borg's inflexibility, but as I stated earlier, none of those players were ones that Dundon said were irreplaceable; Aho was.
Look, maybe the Canes
were unreasonably playing hardball with Aho. But if you ignore the popular narrative, I don't see how we can pretend to know that for sure given that Montreal forced an early end to the process relative to other comparable RFAs that season.
It's been shown that if a lie is repeated often enough people will believe it, no matter how ridiculous it is. That's gotta be double with a narrative that may or may not be true.
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