Ducks center Ryan Kesler is in the midst of a tough season. Despite logging a respectable 17:30 per game, he has just four goals and two assists and with Anaheim looking to shake things up, the veteran would be someone they’d likely be trying to move. However, the 34-year-old has a no-move clause and indicated to Craig Custance of The Athletic (subscription required) that he has no intention of going anywhere:
I don’t want to go anywhere. I love my teammates. I have a family, you take that into account. If we are going into a rebuild, I’m going to do my best to teach the kids how to be a pro and how to win.
Kesler has three years on his contract left after this season with an AAV of $6.675MM. While that would have made him particularly difficult to move, teams have been more willing to swap bad contracts in recent years in the hopes that the newcomer will fare better. It doesn’t appear that the Ducks will be able to try that with Kesler.
More from the Pacific:
- Oilers winger Kailer Yamamoto is expected to return to the lineup on Wednesday, the team announced on Twitter. The 20-year-old has missed the last five games due to an upper-body injury. Edmonton’s top pick in 2017, Yamamoto has been quiet offensively in his stints with the big club this season as he has picked up just a goal and an assist in 13 games. Accordingly, his name has come up in trade speculation following the report yesterday that suggested that the Oilers are willing to part with a young forward in an effort to get someone that can make more of an immediate impact. As the team has a full roster, they’ll have to make a move in order to activate Yamamoto off injured reserve.
- While it was believed that he suffered a concussion back on Saturday, the Sharks are expected to have winger Joonas Donskoi back in the lineup tonight, notes Paul Gackle of The Mercury News. However, they won’t have defenseman Marc-Edouard Vlasic back as he’s set to miss his sixth straight game. He remains listed as day-to-day and has not yet been moved to injured reserve.
While I’m aware that there are nuances to contract negotiations that I’m not privy to, it’s hard not to question why somebody would give a player entering his age 31 season a 6-year extension beyond that season with an NMC for the first 5. It’s as if each team that doles a contract like this out expects their magic signee to defy time. More likely, it has to do with pressure from the fan base to retain marquee free agents and some form of short-term self-preservation.
Or most hockey players are smart enough and courageous enough to not be treated and used as property so they fight to have the ability to discuss and decide with their family if uprooting and moving, or rarely seeing them for large parts of the year is worth it.
That kind of thinking is why there are labor laws and the NHLPA and such because not everyone who makes people billionaires from their own talent are willing to be used like property
Courageous enough to be treated like property only if the price is right. I am not questioning the validity of the rights that players have earned through collective hard efforts over the years, but I think it is fairly obvious that in a competitive vacuum where handing out NMCs is optional, those who do so with less frequency are in a more advantageous position than those who give them to players in the declining phase of their career, in addition to term and dollars. It’s simply unwise to give in on all fronts. If a player desires security in the form of years and NMCs at a time when their performance will likely be more volatile than ever, which they have every right to do, then a team needs to take a step back and realize the enormous amount of long-term risk they are taking on and do their best to minimize it by either front-loading the contract in what will be the more productive years so that the player becomes easier to trade, if necessary, down the road or by reducing the overall price of the contract.
Having said all of that, I think hockey, and sports in general, has an interesting problem when it comes to fairly compensating players. In every major North American pro sport, players, for the most part, do not reach their unrestricted free agent years until after their most productive years are behind them. They are paid for past-performance rather than expected future performance in most cases. There are young superstars that are horrendously underpaid when considering their relative on-ice value, as well as old players who are shells of their former selves that are horrendously overpaid. In the ideal world, hockey would be a meritocracy where players were paid an amount each season that correlated perfectly with their performance relative to their peers. If a player generated 2% of all value created in the league that season, they would be paid 2% of the amount of dollars allocated for players. If only there were a single metric that could perfectly describe a player’s worth.