querulous and memeful though you may be, you're not an idiot. what do you think the reason is that we pay full value and give clauses?
Theories:
1. Laziness - there’s 4 GMs in the entire NHL who have been with one team for 8+ years. The likelihood Drury is around to have to worry about Shesterkin’s NMC in years 5-8 is next to none, so why not just get my guy under contract and let the next guy deal with the fallout?
2. Inexperience - applies to earlier contracts given out. Adam Fox got his contract 5 months after Drury became GM. Probably could have actually gotten some salary suppression given the market had been set by Makar and Fox had publicly played his hand by saying NYR was the only team he would play for. He also gave Goodrow 6 years and a 15 team NTC 2 months into his tenure as GM. We know how that worked out.
3. Skill - Drury is good at some things. He’s been good at identifying solutions to getting contracts off the books and targeting young undervalued pieces with upside in return. I believe that’s what he was trying with Blais too and it was just a miss. We could say that’s a strength. Maybe negotiating salaries against professional agents simply isn’t a strength and some GMs are better at it.
The Panarin contract where he supposedly left money on the table, at least from the Islanders, was signed before he became GM. Same with Kreider.
The Trochek signing, as I’ve very much demonstrated, was largely met with extreme skepticism and it’s only in hindsight because he’s had 2 of the best 3 seasons of his career here that people rewrote history and said he gave us a discount. At the time of the signing he was coming off a 50 point season.
Even Zibanejad, I can argue, got fair market and was not a discount. Same exact age as JT Miller, same exact career points per game, signed the year before (so Miller should get a slight bump for inflation/slight rise in the cap) and Zibanejad got the 8th year while Miller only got 7, yet Zib is higher paid.
But really, I don’t know the answer to your question - that doesn’t make the observation completely invalid and even if you disagree on this contract or that contract it’s splitting hairs; what I’m suggesting isn’t completely off the reservation. It’s not like Mika or Fox signed for 7.5M and I’m over here complaining that Slavin got 6.4M so we need to do better!!! Why doesn’t Drury get a bit more leverage out of NMCs? I don’t know - why does Chiarelli’s name still come up as a legitimate GM candidate sometimes as if nearly the entire world hasn’t formed a consensus that he’s atrocious?
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