Making excuses for the Nurse contract is just weak. Edmonton put themselves into the situation they did because they "double bridged" him.
2 year deal after his ELC ended, then another 2 year deal after that. They waited too long to make a decision, and then faced with the prospect of him walking directly into UFA one year in the future after he had a good year in the weak North-only division, and a market condition partially set by RIGHT-HANDED Defenseman Seth Jones receiving 8x$9.5 million, they ended up giving a LEFT-HANDED Defenseman Darnell Nurse only slightly less than that.
It was a self-inflicted error that was pretty obvious the moment it occurred. Good GMs don't do that, whether the contract is slightly discounted by state tax savings or not.
Both you and Laus are right about Nurse but I do have sympathy for the Northern teams. I can’t defend this too much, and I think Nurse is an unfortunate case of “being close to great but not close enough”.
It seems the Nurse deal was the …. I’d describe it as the tip toe. From my perspective it looks like both the team and the player were figuring out the final role. Minutes got pushed hard at times and then decisions were made. No excuses though..it’s a tough situation.
A lot of the Northern guys during this time either pushed their final year and thus qualifying offer to the moon while leaving 1-2 years - the stereotype example being Matthew Tkachuk, or tried to double bridge/get to ufa via a 5/6 year after elc the stereotype being Marner/Matthews or Nurse.
In either case - it seems the objective of a player doing that is to force either a giant payday or gtfo.
So when Nurse does it too…I mean he looked okay so …. I mean it’s tough…
I’m sure they looked at letting him go and I wonder what that plan looked like. It would be tough to choose to let him go perhaps. Perhaps not. Idk.
I will concede that I’m wrong about some of the management stuff. I’m upgrading you to asterisk. Merry Xmas. FWIW my issue has absolutely nothing to do with the fans of teams and everything to do with what I feel is the league being disengenuous. I don’t think this situation needs a heavy handed fix and I feel the relief it would provide only strengthens the league. I feel they have a track record of being disengenuous and gas lighting. I feel it’s the same with concussions, and they should be better but anyway, no soapboxes on holidays.
FWIW my fix would be to increase the salary cap of taxed state teams by appx .2% each year for 2 years - total increase is less than 1 million or .4%, and decrease the salary cap of the 6 no tax teams by the dollar amount that results in a net 0 total change to the salary cap, which ends up being around 1.8%, or less than 1 million per year for 2 years, or a total impact of less than 2 million.
At a cap of 88 million, this is a gentle nudge and I believe it would be all that it would take to increase parity while maintaining health in both taxes and non taxed states. It also would show the league prioritizes parity.
Sometimes when you do something it causes folks to assume you may do more. In this case you could nudge again if you needed, and it could incentivize parity-improving behaviors: perhaps dampen the demand for movement clauses and slightly decentivize the splintering that’s occurring with comparable contracts. I’d also not want to directly harm any team and these changes are smaller than performance bonus overages usually are, so it’s smaller than the pill these folks typically swallow.
