Like I said just look at O'Reilly in Colorado, he wasn't happy with Colorado bargaining hard and so he signed an offer sheet and is now seems to want to be UFA at the earliest possible time whereas he was willing to sell his UFA years before then. Johansen in Columbus also doesn't seem happy with a potential bridge deal.
I'm not sure how you can say it wasn't much of a risk given that Subban actually sat out a couple weeks. That's never a good thing.
You shouldn't bargain hard just because he's a RFA. That just creates a dynamic where once the player is proven he'll want max value. It's much better policy to establish loyalty with the player by treating them fairly so that when they are in a position to ask for the moon they'll be more likely to give you a discount.
But the thing is, Subban has always maintained that he wants to be a Montreal Canadien for life. He has made that clear. O'Reilly and Johansen haven't. And even with the bridge deal, Subban still didn't go for max value. I can assure you he would've earned more on the open market.
Again, the process that was chosen ended up being the best process in my opinion. We save money in the long run. If he were to go UFA in three years, he would be paid a lot more than he is now, and we wouldn't have been able to acquire star players like Vanek which enabled us to go on such a deep playoff run.
I understand your point, but I think with the way things have turned out, it is hard for you to make a point that it was a bad decision for the team. We ended up getting a better deal than we would have if we signed him to the 5x5. But granted, if he were a player like O'Reilly, this course of action would've failed miserably.
No it doesn't. You cannot plan for UFA days. If a player wants to become an UFA, then he's going to become one and there's nothing you can do about it. That is a fact people here constantly leave out.
From a managerial standpoint, you get to lock up a Norris winner for 5 years at 5M, that is a smart decision.
Getting into a contractual dispute with your star player forcing him to hold out and miss camp/games because you're undervaluing him only to have to make him the highest cap hit Dman in the NHL just two years later is not a smart managing decision.
We could have had him for 5years, and then extended him just like he agreed to an 8 year deal. After his own words, it should be pretty darn clear that unless we really messed up with him, he doesn't want to go somewhere else, so no reason to speculate he'd leave.
How can you possibly respond "no it doesn't" to the
fact that it makes more managerial sense to get as many UFA years out of your player as possible, for as cheap as you can get? That's literally the one thing every GM is trying to do with all their top players. You can't just say "no" and ignore the point.
Subban made it clear he doesn't want to leave Montreal from day one, and maintained this rhetoric throughout the arbitration process. So in his case, the smarter move would be to lock him up for as many years as possible for as cheap as we can get. Having him go UFA in three years would just mean a larger contract for the Habs, and he would be a much more expensive player than we currently have him signed for. The bridge deal was the safe option, most GM's would have done the same thing, and it ended up paying off in the end.
My guess is that Subban would not have become a UFA, but would have happily re-signed with the Habs for whatever the market value of a top-five dman is in 2017. Hometown discounts? Not with Don Meehan at the bargaining table.
I agree, he most probably wouldn't have gone UFA and re-signed with the Habs, but that contract would be millions more than the contract he is currently signed to. Just like you said, with Meehan doing the negotiations, Molson would be milked for every dollar he is worth.
In the end, there is no ill-will between Subban and the management/ownership, and we got Subban for a great price, so I find it really hard to agree with posters arguing that we went about this the wrong way. Don't get me wrong, if this contract wasn't signed, I would never forgive Bergevin. But it worked out, and we don't know how the negotiations went behind closed doors, but everyone seems very happy with how things turned out so I find it hard to criticize how the team went about doing things.