I don't see how Subban asking for a fair wage has anything to do with how much he likes Montreal. From what we've seen of him, he's probably the most implicated in his community and one of the guys that always 110% on the ice. He's the embodiment of the "CH tatoué sur le coeur", more than anybody else on this team.
After being grossly underpaid over the last two years, you can't honestly expect him to take yet another pay cut. Why would he? He knows what he's worth and deserves to get paid accordingly.
Let's put things into context. You one of the best specialist in a technology field and know you are easily able to fecth up to 100k a year on the job market, but you've been working for the same company since you got out of school and while you like very much there, you feel under appreciated by the boss and he won't offer you anything over 70k a year. What do you do?
These numbers times 100 and you get the big picture of the Subban situation.
I don't think we can, or should, extrapolate from a smaller wage bracket what should be the case in a higher one. Suppose that we were talking about billions of dollars and not millions and that the argument was over a difference of 8 or 8.5 billion. At some point you would recoil and think, holy christ that is a lot of money, stop arguing publicly about the fact that .5 billion in that context is a measure of respect or fair wage. Just be happy. Nobody in the real world gets that, no matter how many examples at my wage level you present.
We've grown accustomed to treating 5-6 million yearly wages as perfectly normal for a hockey player, so differences in that range don't cause any recoiling, but its a tremendous amount of money. As I said, I can rationalize this process to a certain degree, like you, and determine a "fair wage" relative to a bunch of contextual factors, like other wages, market value, etc, but there is a breaking point where nobody looks reasonable any longer. If there was a 64 million dollar contract on the table and Subban balked at that as being disrespectful, or not enough, the only conclusion I can take is that he doesn't believe anything he says about loving Montreal. That's just a ploy to make more money.
People say, hey Subban should get paid every penny he deserves, and he should if he wants, but if he really does love it here, and if he really does bleed red, white, and blue, and he's offered the biggest contract in the history of the Habs, and its 1.5 millon more than everyone else on your team makes, then he should take the 8 million per year and accept the fact he couldn't extract more money from management. That's life, sometimes you accept less to get more of the things you want. But don't tell me that he cares about being a Hab when he turned down 64 million. He cares about getting the most money possible. Fin.
The same is true of acting, sometimes you take less to work on a project you care about. The same is true of everyone, sometimes you take less to be a part of something you care about. I'm only taking Subban at his word when he says he loves the Habs and wants to stay here. If he said, I want the most money I can possibly make and that's my plan, fine, do that. It's your right and thank you for peeling off the mask and not screwing around with the fans.
