I will say this:
Agents obviously have a vested interest in what players sign for as it is their livelihood and they make an enormous amount of money from these deals. For example, Krejci's agent stands to make $1.5 million off of Krejci's new deal.
99% of the time players act on the agents advise and recommendations and rarely get involved in the negotiations until the very end.
Soderberg is an anomaly. He's of the breed that tells his agent "I want X and I want to play in Y. Just get it done" Y is Boston. X won't be an exorbitant amount.
Dom, been saying this for awhile. Probably 4 or 5 years ago I spoke with a Swedish poster who was from Malmo and had followed Soderberg closely. I asked why he hadn't come over yet, etc., and the guy said he's just a different cat, and walks to the beat of his own drummer. Said Carl was not about the money, but being comfortable where he was.
When he was playing in the Allsvenskan, a lot of people tried to say that he wasn't talented enough to be in the SHL (SEL at time), but that wasn't the case. He stayed with Malmo for several years just to try to get them back into the SEL when he could have left at any time. At one point, the team even went bankrupt in mid-season, and while other vets bolted because they didn't think they were going to get paid, Carl stayed and narrowly missed leading a bunch of kids promoted from Malmo's junior team to the playoffs (the legend of the yeti grows
).
Does that sound like a guy that's all about the money? If he likes Boston and feels loyalty to them for waiting for him to come over, the last thing he will do is bend them over on an extension.
