It sounds like NJ and Sutter mutually agreed to part ways which would void his contract making him available to any other team. There really is no precedent I can remember of a staff member wanting out of their deal and their team refusing.
The whole idea is that there would be interest in all parties: the Pens, Sullivan, and a team that wants to trade for Sullivan. If Sullivan simply resigns, there’s no guarantee he can get as much money as he’s currently getting and none of us really know if the league would prevent him from going to another team if the Pens wouldn’t want him to.
“There really is no precedent I can remember of a staff member wanting out of their deal and their team refusing.”
Well Mike Keenen’s exit as the Rangers’ HC, one month after winning the Cup, was pretty messy.
Keenen did this at a July 15th 1994 presser:
"I'm here to announce that I am no longer coach of the New York Rangers," he said, adding that he had not resigned but rather had become "a free agent" because of the breaching of his five-year contract.
"The New York Rangers did not fulfill their contractual obligations," he said, "and as a result of that breach I'm no longer employed by the New York Rangers."
Beyond saying that a "substantial" amount of money was involved, the 44-year-old Keenan refused to discuss the specifics of the contractual obligations, but within hours of his announcement the Rangers' parent company, Madison Square Garden, issued a statement saying it had been stunned by his action.
Then on July 17, 1994 he became the Blues GM/HC.
The NHL didn’t buy what Keenen was selling. Keenen got suspended for 60 days and fined 100k and the Blues were fined 250k.
The Rangers got this trade in the settlement on July 25th:
Petr Nedved to the Rangers for forward Esa Tikkanen and defenseman Doug Lidster. (Got to love those 1990s settlement trades.)
Side Note: The Blues were on fire in 1994, they also egregiously tampered with a Scott Stevens offer sheet that off-season though they didn’t pay the piper for that until 1999. (GM Ron Caron did the tampering before Keenen was hired.)
Not sure if there’s any other situation like that.
Being a weirdly vindictive employer isn’t the NHL way, you want to be place where people want to work, not a place that holds unhappy coaches hostage.
Obviously coaches don’t typically resign because they get paid even if they get fired. And I don’t know exactly how the resignation process works, not a contract lawyer.
The NHL isn’t going to prevent him from going to another team though. Keenen wasn’t blocked from his job in St Louis after all that drama for example.
If there’s suspected tampering, or some other infraction, then there’s an investigation and/or punishments.
For a more recent example than Sutter of a coach resigning then hired elsewhere, Bill Peters resigned as HC of the Canes on April 20, 2018, with a year left on his deal, and then was hired by the Flames on April 23, 2018.
www.nytimes.com
The Mike Keenan dispute was resolved Sunday night in a complicated settlement announced by NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman.
www.latimes.com
www.capfriendly.com
