Nylander following the Shana-plan
Free agent looking at the long-term, just like his boss did when he was winger’s age
As a hall-of-fame player, Brendan Shanahan was known as a hockey renaissance man. Gifted with the expert hands of a goal scorer and the ruthless fists of a fighter, he was the book-reading, newspaper-devouring intellect who preferred off-season trips to France to summers on the golf course.
He was also an unrepentant fibber. Known for penning media-guide bios that raised eyebrows, at various points in his career Shanahan claimed hobbies including backup goalkeeper on the Irish national soccer team, ball boy at tennis’s U.S. Open, and extra in the movie Forrest Gump. It was all fiction, pure and silly. As a player, Shanahan seemed to enjoy looking the media in the eye and offering a playful wink.
As president of the Maple Leafs, maybe he still does. How else do you explain the gist of the transatlantic message Shanahan delivered to restricted free agent William Nylander before Wednesday’s season-opening win over the Canadiens.
Asked about the so-far-unfruitful negotiations that, as of Thursday, had Nylander skating in Stockholm without a contract, Shanahan harked back to his late-career run with the Red Wings.
He suggested he and his Detroit teammates made financial sacrifices to keep a championship team intact.
“That’s obviously what we are asking some of our young leaders to do (in Toronto),” Shanahan told reporters.
Let’s assume he was joking, because the comparison was mostly laughable. Not that there wasn’t obvious truth in some of what he said. Shanahan is hardly the first observer to suggest Leafs such as Nylander and Auston Matthews and Mitch Marner –— the latter two of whom are beginning the final year of their concurrent entry-level contracts and eligible to sign extensions — will need to accept discounted deals if they hope to play together on a Stanley Cup contender under a hard salary cap. Simple math suggests as much.
But Shanahan got disingenuous in a hurry as he continued his discourse. The team president, for starters, insisted prodigal-son free agent John Tavares, who arrived in July after signing a seven-year deal worth $77 million (all figures U.S.), “took less” to be a Maple Leaf. Maybe that’s theoretically true; reports had it that San Jose was offering slightly bigger money. But given that Tavares came into free agency having earned about $33 million in salary in nine seasons with the Islanders — and given how he’ll earn a league-high $15.9 million this season when you combine his salary and signing bonus — Tavares is hardly the obvious illustration of Cup-or-bust selflessness to toss in the face of rookie-scale players still looking for their first big NHL payday. And neither, frankly, is Shanahan.
Anyone with a cursory knowledge of NHL history knows that those Detroit-based Stanley Cup runs of which he spoke happened in the pre-salary-cap era. The famed 2002 Stanley Cup juggernaut that boasted nine future hall-of-famers left owners Mike and Marian Ilitch with the bill for the league’s highest payroll. And while it’s true Shanahan did, in the spring of 2000, forego free agency and a potentially higher payday to stay in Detroit, his situation was hardly comparable to the one facing Nylander, Matthews and Marner. Shanahan, unlike the young Leafs, was deep into a wildly successful career. He’d already piled millions upon millions. He told reporters he was building a dream home in the Detroit suburbs. Married with children, he said staying put was about “laying down roots.”
Shanahan, mind you, did once find himself in a situation more akin to Nylander’s current quandary. At age 22, Shanahan was a restricted free agent with the New Jersey Devils. How’d that go? He bolted for bigger money in St. Louis, leaving behind a Lou Lamoriello-built Devils team that would win a Stanley Cup a few years later.
Now, the rules around restricted free agency were different then. But make no mistake. At age 22, precisely Nylander’s age, Shanahan looked out for Shanahan. He became the seventh-highest-paid player in the NHL, earning more in his first year in St. Louis than Mark Messier would earn winning the Hart Trophy for the New York Rangers. And as for pursuing the Stanley Cup? Partly as a result of the price St. Louis paid to acquire Shanahan — which included captain Scott Stevens in a controversial compensation award — the Blues lost in the first round of the playoffs in three of Shanahan’s four seasons in St. Louis. They never made it past the second round. In other words, Shanahan’s priority in his youth was building his fortune, not his legend.
Nothing wrong with that. Players ought to look out for themselves, just as Shanahan did years later when he relinquished his captaincy and asked for a trade out of a flailing franchise in Hartford. The season before Shanahan moved to the Blues, he was hit by a puck that broke his cheekbone and jaw. A doctor told him if the puck had plunked him a half-inch higher, he would have lost his eye.
The near miss underlined a hard truth: Players are commodities with uncertain career horizons. Nylander, whose father Michael played for seven different NHL franchises and was traded at least five times, seems acutely aware of this. So if Nylander has reportedly asked for a long-term deal with an annual average value around $8 million, and the Leafs would prefer he earn something closer $6 million in their push to keep the band together, you can understand the disconnect. It’s easy to say the money doesn’t matter when the money isn’t yours.
Which is not to say Nylander is engaging in sound strategy here. His only leverage, after all, is the impact of his absence. An offer sheet from a competing NHL team could force the issue, but seems unlikely; the last one signed by a player came in 2013. Unless Nylander signs with a team in Europe, every day he’s not under contract is a day of salary squandered. Based on a $6 million deal, that’s about $32,000 out the window every 24 hours. Still, however you view the potential effectiveness of Nylander’s tactics, you can argue he’s merely following the Shana-plan, playing-career edition. He’s attempting to maximize his compensation.
“I’m a professional athlete and just a product in the big picture,” Nylander told the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet on Thursday. “At the end of the day, I have to take care of myself and do what I and my agent think is right. Especially if it’s about several years to come. I have to think long term. It’s my own future it’s about.”
Shanahan, of course, is making the case that both the team and its young stars can happily coexist in memory-making, Cup-contending harmony while everybody rakes in plenty of money, give or take a few million. It’s the standard card to play in the salary-cap universe. And history suggests it’ll work. This is the league where the best player on the planet, Connor McDavid, voluntarily took less money even when the Edmonton Oilers were willing to give him more; where Sidney Crosby once opted for a modest $8.7 million annual average salary that was more a nod to his obsession with numerical symmetry than to getting as rich as possible.
So Shanahan is only suggesting Toronto’s young leaders do what bigger names have done without complaint. But it’d be wrong for Shanahan to suggest with a straight face that he’s asking them to do as he once did, which seems important here. When you’re urging your players to give you a discount, you’re asking them to take you at your word.
“At the end of the day, I have to take care of myself ... It’s my own future it’s about.” WILLIAM NYLANDER