He’s also playing for SJ n not the leafs
Ultimately that would have been best if it opened up a path to a player like Roy - not sure what was available.
Where were you the last 6 years? I'm not an NHL GM but some probably could have got a better deal. I haven't ever seen any real justification for 3m. We also could have taken him to arbitration, which probably would have been cheaper. We could have traded him in the offseason and used his money and Hakanpaa's money for a bigger fish. We could have not signed Hakanpaa and kept Liljegren for the season instead of now having neither and playing worse defensemen.
See, this is what I mean. There’s no way to know who’s right, but only one of us seems to think they know more than Treliving and Pridham. If arbitration would’ve been lower, why would they sign a guy they didn’t want to keep? That doesn’t make sense. And the two-year, $3 million contract with front-loaded payments may have actually increased his trade value by adding salary certainty and reducing the financial commitment for the acquiring team.
Your argument seems to be that all GMs are perfect, they all do exactly the moves that they should, there is no difference in negotiating ability, all players get paid exactly what they should, and nobody should ever question anything. It seems odd that this is coming out now, instead of the half decade where our GM was routinely blasted despite much less justification.
Liljegren would be our 5th best defenseman. If our coach wouldn't play our 5th best defenseman over worse defensemen, then we have a coaching issue too.
Me saying that your assessment that you could have signed Liljegren for less, even though you acknowledge we don't know what went down is pretty far from me saying that all GMs are perfect, no?
Again, I never said that I could have signed him for less. I said that Treliving signed him for too much, and that a different GM may have been able to get a better deal. And that there were multiple alternative pathways. I'm not sure why you find that so egregious. Most people in the signing thread felt like it was too much too, and I haven't seen any good argument. It's a short term RFA deal that walked him straight to UFA, and he hadn't yet shown beyond a bottom pairing defenseman. The only thing I can think of that could have raised his cost was the amount of minutes we were forced to play him last year, but that would also be Treliving's fault, because it was the result of him making the exact same mistake as Hakanpaa and signing a broken down player last year.
It’s clear we don’t see eye to eye on the Liljegren contract. You’re not saying that you could have done better, but that the GM didn’t maximize the deal. Fair enough, but experts I follow projected the contract between $2.9M and $3.6M, so it wasn’t exactly an overpay. The front-loaded structure might even have made him more appealing on the trade market. We also wanted him signed and not risk the timing and potential extra costs of arbitration.
