Monk
Registered User
- Feb 5, 2008
- 7,504
- 5,398
It's 50/50.
But to put this in personal terms. So your family takes on a foreign exchange student. The day the student arrives you decide to take your family on vacation and leave a key under the front door mat. Do you really expect good things to happen?
Now imagine a Russian coming to the USA, he spoke English (better than Zherdev) but the CBJ should have bent over backwards to make sure he was set. Again his agent should have done the same. Nash and leadership should have stepped in. But no one did.
Lot of teams (look at Pittsburgh) went out of their way (Mario opened up his home) to make sure elite rookie players were cared for.
Great teams (employers) set their players (employees) up to be successful. For a very long time the CBJ didn't. Lot of folks to blame but when we saw flop after flop from early draft picks (and outside of Zherdev not a lot of reaches, just selecting best player)
But at the same time, I'm not sure rolling out the red carpet would have helped with the ego issues some of these guys had. And those ego issues were a serious contributing factor to some of these guys' failures. I wonder how many therapists the team employs. Probably not enough.