As his career has progressed, I think we’ve seen where his priorities really lie.
He seems to love what playing professional hockey brings him (ex. money, fame, women) but not professional hockey itself. Almost like he uses it as a tool to get what he wants out of life, but he doesn’t have the desire to actually improve his game past the point of scoring 15-20 goals a season and making millions per to do so (and frankly, this speaks volumes about how much pro athletes are paid).
If he was smart with his money, he could retire right now having made more money in a 6 year career than most working people will make in a lifetime.
This isn't really fair.
He's improved A TON over the past 3-4 years, from a guy who struggled to score in the AHL in 16-17 to a bottom-6 NHL forward for a couple years to a guy who scored a at 22-22-44 pace last year and was a legit quality middle-6 forward. This isn't the profile at all of guys like Gilbert Brule or Nikita Filatov who actually didn't put in any effort into improving. His defensive play in particular has improved by leaps and bounds and he's gone from a guy cluelessly standing still without the puck as a junior player to a guy who can play on high-leverage defensive lines as a pro.
Absolutely bizarre to keep focusing in on Virtanen not meeting his own completely unreasonable expectations and doubling down on denigrating the value of his own asset...
It's one of the weirder things I've ever seen Benning do, and that's saying something.
Like, if he'd given Virtanen a $5 million contract like Tuch's last summer and then Tuch outplayed Virtanen ... fair enough! But raking your $1.25 million guy over the coals because he wasn't as dynamic as their $5 million guy?
I have an older brother who is very very intelligent, but he simply cannot grasp the concept of opportunity cost. The rationalizations to ignore it are mind-bottling.
Yeah, I know people like that, too. And obviously there are heaps of posters here. It's really strange and it really isn't that hard of a concept, you wouldn't think.
But if you argue that it's smarter to put Gaudette in the Toffoli roster spot for $1.5 million and spend $4 million elsewhere than it is to spend $5.5 million on Toffoli to be slightly better than Gaudette, all you get is YA BUT TOFFOLI IS A BIT BETTER AND MIGHT SCORE 5 MORE POINTS type responses.
Like, if Tyler Myers last summer had 3 years remaining on a deal that paid him $700k/year and Benning traded a #1 pick for Myers ... that's a great deal! If Gaunce or Biega made $4 million, I would have been tearing them to shreds and wanted them the hell off the roster. People simply cannot grasp that what you're looking at in a capped league is value relative to contract.