True. Guess it's easier to gauge what a forward will get than a Defenseman.
I don't remember what people expected from Dumoulin, but at least I didn't end up far from him. I was like $350k low with Dumoulin and $350k high with Sheary. I think people were wrong with Schultz because:
A. They assumed that he didn't care as much about money and more cared about staying in a good situation where he played well in.
B. He was pretty awful not that long ago, so he might not have the track record to get a lot of money over a lot of years.
C. He did make a lot of money right off the bat, seeing how he made like $3.75-$4 million a year with Edmonton.
It was a thought of "Schultz doesn't want to leave and get into another awful siuation like Edmonton, so he'll sign for a little less to stay here". It just didn't end up going that way, because Rutherford paid him what he thought he might get in arbitration. People here just made logical assumptions that ended up being wrong, because JR didn't want to gamble on him getting to arbitration. Looking back on it in hindsight, how could you really expect anything different? What would Schultz's agent say to Rutherford when he said "we like Schultz, but he sucked ass before he came here, so we want him to take less"?