It’s been eight days since the NHL’s annual free-agent frenzy, and I’m still trying to make sense of a few things.
First, Jeff Finger got a four-year, $14 million contract from Toronto. No matter how many times I repeat that, I still can’t believe it. No offense to Finger, a nice guy and decent defenseman, but that signing reminds me of the six-year, $13 million contract the Atlanta Hawks gave reserve center Jon Koncak in 1989. To the disbelieving sports world, Koncak would forever be known as “Jon Contract.” When he signed the deal, Koncak was making more than Larry Bird, Magic Johnson or Michael Jordan. You can look it up.
Isn’t it great that the NHL canceled an entire season because owners said they were losing money and blamed most of it on outrageous contracts — and now we see them giving guys like Finger $14 million? Yes, there’s a salary cap now, and as long as the revenues are there to fill up each team’s cap, it doesn’t matter how foolishly they spend the money.
That’s not the point. The point is, NHL owners are showing themselves to be just as dumb as they were before the 2004-05 lockout, and when your team loses a favorite player because he wants as much money as Finger, but it doesn’t have the cap room to keep him, don’t come whining to me.
The other thing that still doesn’t make sense is the whole Jose Theodore situation with the Avalanche. The Avs wanted to keep him, and Theodore wanted to stay. But the Avs just wouldn’t budge over their two-year, $7 million offer, and Theodore wound up taking a two-year, $9 million deal from a team, Washington, that viewed him as a back-burner alternative to the guy it really wanted to keep, Cristobal Huet.
Why couldn’t the Avs bridge that gap, though? In the end, both sides got stubborn over short money, and deals never happen when it gets to that point.
I can see both sides to the argument: The Avs thought they overpaid for what they received prior to last season from Theodore (and they did), and wanted something of a hometown discount as payback.
But as Theodore’s agent, Don Meehan, pointed out to me Tuesday: Theodore won the Avs a playoff round (and he did), and the marketplace was different suddenly, especially with Huet getting $22.5 million over four years from Chicago. And, a million dollars a year is “a pretty good difference,” he said.
I guess so. But to guys like Finger now, a million dollars is chump change.
