L'affaire Heatley has been bumped off the top page by some interesting developments around the league;
Did Brian Burke and Ron Wilson tamper with the Sedin twins?
If you go by the letter of the law, it sure looks like it to me. The rules are you do not talk about fight club. You do not talk about fight club. But the audio pretty clearly has Wilson speculating out loud about the Sedins and Burke's trip to Sweden. Looks like a slam-dunk to me, but this is the Leafs we are talking about, and for the highest revenue generating team in the league they probably get to play by different rules.
Did the Tampa Bay Lightning mgt tamper with Mathias Ohlund?
This one looks fishier, but is less clear cut in reaching a conclusion that they did. Afterall, I guess its possible they negotiated a highly complex contract deal in the few minutes after free-agency began.
What kind of mega-screwup just happened in Chicago?
Both Kirs Verseteeg and Cam Barker could become unrestricted free-agents because the Chi-Hawk brass snail mailed their qualifying offers to them the day before the deadline.
As for L'affaire Heatley, things are clearly very very weird. The Oliers sent top brass to recruit him, and one would think that Heatley's rejection of their offer would cause the Oilers to nullify their interest and pull-out. But they haven't. Did Heatley give them a reason to hope things might work out after the $4M got paid? Did Murray get permission from Heatley to discuss with the Oilers as a way of driving up the market price - while also having no intention of going there? Did Murray create a deal with Edmonton knowing that Heatley wasn't on board? Only time will tell...
2 comments:
I watched TSN talking about how Burke was in Sweden to talk with "the Monster" and kept thinking: "no, he went there hoping to talk to the Sedins". I don't know the details of the tampering rules but if they didn't talk contract then I doubt that there was a real problem.
The Ohlund case is more interesting to me because I think it exposes something that we all know takes place...Hypothetically if I were the agent for a 6'4" power forward who netted 35 goals in each of the last two seasons, what would a contract look like from your team? I'm sure they were not talking about Ohlund before July 1st but rather were talking about a hypothetical player who, surprisingly, resembles Ohlund in many key respects. File this under nudge-nudge, wink-wink.
I would be really surprised if the Hawks don't find themselves in some trouble over this and Tallon shown the door. Stupid, stupid mistake. Why on earth do you NOT fax it?
As for Heatley, I still say he ends up an Oiler. Don't know why (and not even sure it would be the best thing for the team) but I think in the end he comes here and scores a lot of goals and all (at least in Edmonton) is quickly forgiven.
Rules are meant to be bent / be grey aren't they? ;-) Like Doug says - if you don't mention the guy's name, could hypothetically be talking about anyone. Its just so darn shameful... although we are talking about sports world ethics here.
The snail mail thing is bizarre.. I still don't get that one. Was Chicago's fax machine out of order? Was there no Staples business center or equivalent nearby? Did the summer student get told to send the offers and made a mistake? (summer student probably would have text messaged the offers so that is probably not the reason).
Looks less and less likely that Heatley will be back in Ottawa with Kovalev signing. I don't suspect that Ottawa would perform the ultimate punishment on Heatley and send him to arch-enemy TO (not even Heatley could help the Leafs))... I can appreciate Heatley not wanting to live in Edmonchuk but hey, at least they have a marginally adequate hockey team as opposed to either Ontario team.
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