BlackRedGold said:
It's typical garbage aimed at misguided Albertans.
Well, that's rather inflamatory and quite, shall we say, biggotted. I thought they had rules against that type of stuff around here (racial slurs/sexist/ethnic stereotyping/xenophobic comments, see rule #4)?
There are some contracts on there that have caused salaries to rise but Holik and Lapointe had no effect on anyone else's salary while Jagr and Leclair had little effect.
The author points out how those contracts contributed to the inflationary spiral in the NHL. He makes a very good point and backs up his comments. Do you have anything that would counter his opinion and support yours? Any sort of proof or paper trail? I agree with the writer that many of these contracts set unreasonable expectations that allowed salary escalation to get out of hand.
It's also pretty damn biased that he blames Theodore when Theodore's contract was based upon the one that Iginla signed. Why wasn't Iginla's contract mentioned?
I'm not sure if it is biased because he was looking at a particular angle with these two players (the one-year wonders was how he put it). He supports his belief when he says "Prior to their deals, goalies signed to mega-contracts either had a long history of success," and then lists the goaltenders to have signed large contracts prior to the deals in question. Both Theodore and Giguere cashed in huge for one season's performance, and have yet to repeat that success. He stated that "Neither have managed to live up to the value or expectations", in his article which further supports his angle of one year not being worthy of such massive contracts.
Iginla was hardly a one year wonder and was coming off a big contract of his own (
http://www.canoe.ca/HockeyCalgaryArchive/oct8_fla.html), prior to get the contract you suggest (
http://www.allsports.com/network/content?site=1024&story=33960) was the framework for Theodore's contract. So because of the performance factors of Iginla's career, the number of contracts he had worked through, he had been in the NHL since he was 19, it goes without saying that Iginla and Theodore were not comparable and that Montreal hit the panic button in signing Theodore to the contract they did.