“When I get together with some of my old mates from the Cup years in Detroit, we talk about winning together and growing together, and that’s what we remember,” Shanahan said in early October of 2018. “We all found a way to fit with each other so that we could keep adding to the group… That’s obviously what we’re asking some of our young leaders to do."
It’s not a fun conversation, but we cannot strip away the context of how contracts have been handled by this management group to date, either. It’s not the literal $1.5-2 million Mitch Marner is overpaid by that is the really uneasy part here — it’s the culture it creates when the top earners refuse to make even a nominal sacrifice for the sake of the team.
You can argue that Marner and his agent were well within their rights to scratch and claw for every penny, but to be clear, the unyielding “I’m getting mine” attitude was definitely not how the organization saw this playing out. We know this because of a telling quote from Brendan Shanahan when the William Nylander standoff was underway back in 2018.