all i've been disagreeing with is saying there's noooo chance players like that would ever go to their canadian hometowns if given the option...they'd only go to the evil big corporation teams? ignoring that three of the six biggest teams by franchise value are canadian.
No one has been saying there's 'no chance', just that there would be a significant disadvantage if you were to take away most of the leverage a team has with a player they drafted and developed.
Look at it this way: the worst case probably isn't going to happen, but the Disneyland scenario of players suddenly wanting to go to markets that have traditionally struggled to attract talent to be a net positive is also likely not going to happen.
All that's going to happen is what has happened in the past (again, look at the Oilers were basically a revolving door of talent as one example) and is
currently happening becoming more of the same.
It's not just Canadian teams, either.
if you disagree, curious as to why... but not sure what you're trying to argue other than "in the 90s the league was bad for canadian teams." ok? was the ufa age 22 back then?
The UFA age up until 2005 was 25. Factoring in that most players don't start playing pro right at 18, that meant in the case of guys like Arnott, they were gone after 3-4 seasons.
And to repeat myself:
People are going to point at and say 'no salary cap' or at other factors that did play a role in the above scenarios, but that is sort of the point: anything that creates a significant disadvantage or disincentivizes players to go to a particular market or stick with it is going to cause problems.
I'm not saying that the league was bad for Canadian teams, I am saying that the league was bad for unappealing markets. Canadian ones but also American ones.
i genuinely don't get what precedent you're citing...
Vancouver was not a particularly lucrative market for free agents up until the Messier signing, and even after that there was anxiety over guys like Naslund, Bertuzzi (that was the whole f***ing story for the season until he re-signed) and even Luongo bailing.
Ditto for Buffalo. Or Atlanta. Or Minnesota (eg, Gaborik basically bolted as soon as he was able to.) Or Winnipeg, Calgary, Edmonton, Phoenix, etc.
is it because the new york rangers in like 2002 under no cap could give bobby holik a stupid contract no one else could match, and you think a version of that would happen again under this hypothetical scenario?
Again: the point is anything that creates a significant disadvantage or disincentivizes players to go to a particular market or stick with it is going to cause problems.
And to spell it out: the disadvantage is that teams lose leverage with players they've drafted/developed because they can bolt very quickly. Not the Canadian dollar being low or a lack of a cap or whatever you're talking about.
We've seen it post and pre salary cap and the general trend is that teams will take advantage of it.
