B.A. Gustafsson, Josh Holden, Rafael Diaz or Anton Gustafsson?

In the NHL the lowest salary is just a little more than $ 500’000.— and the highest is around $10 Mio. I guess – if we wouldn’t have the salary-cap this difference would be even higher. Everybody knows the salary of eachother, it's a more or less open book and jealousy is not really a problem. Some players are even proud to play with the 8 Mio-man Crosby in the same team and they are not jealous! Different mentality...

Change of the scenery: Swiss pro-league. Last week the Zurich Lions hired Swedish Olympic Gold-medal coach B.A. Gustafsson and Zug resigned defenseman Rafael Diaz for estimated 600k per season. Salary-differences between 150k and 600k in our league will lead into sometimes ugly, jealous discussions. This is our mentality. A little bit more than rumours tell that Gustafsson was one of the most expensive coaches on the market. Right now there is a big discussion in Hockey-Switzerland about whether the contract-extension of the Zug defenseman Rafael Diaz for 600k is stupid or not. Nobody talks about the most probably expensive signing of B.A. Gustafsson. What is my view to all this?

Personally I really do believe that B.A. Gustafsson is a very good coach and a very intelligent person but like all coaches he has his certain methods, he has is own view of human beings and he follows his own philosophies with players on and off the ice. This means what it means with most coaches: Some players will play better under Gustafsson and some players will play worse. Some players blossom under the maybe new methodics and some players will falter. In the very end personally I do think that Gustafsson is a brilliant coach for intelligent players and players with a high level of self-responsibility but not all players are intelligent and not all players show much self-responsibility.

Second case is Rafael Diaz. Diaz is a young (26 or so) and still improving defenseman. Right now he might be the best Swiss defenseman in the Swiss league but definitely is one of the best (there are probably three, maximum four other Swiss d-men in our league who are as good as Diaz). In my eyes Diaz plays extremely smart and can play a high-tempo-game. He is also on the radar of NHL-scouts and he deserves it. He is not a spectacular player on first sight – he plays very well in a more quiet way but he does it on a really high level and he does he so smart! I do recommend to follow the development of Diaz to all NHL-organisations. If he can improve in the strength- and conditioning-department he definitely will get a chance for a try-out in the NHL. I like Diaz so much that I present him the “label” as a so called franchise-player for the Swiss-League. Is he overpaid with 600k per season (for my readers from outside Switzerland you must know that with 600k he belongs to the very best paid players in our league)? No, he is not overpaid. Maybe they could have signed him for a little less plus incentives but this maybe is a too big risk. They could have lost their franchise-player for just a handful of bucks because definitely nobody else would have signed him for less than 520 or 530 or so. In my eyes it was a wise decision from Zug to sign him as their future franchise-player. He is expensive, yes - so what? If a team like the ZSC lions complains about the price of Diaz and then the next day hires Gustafsson as their new coach? Common... Diaz is young, has energy, plays already on a top-level and it’s very likely that he will become even better. It’s always the big question whether you should pay extra for older players who did already win a lot in their career or if you should pay for actual performance and potential. I definitely would choose the second and Rafael Diaz belongs to this second category. Well done Zug! Don’t get me wrong, the best player in Zug is Canadien Josh Holden and he is now not the best paid player anymore but this is not unfair and probably doesn’t make Holden too angry because Josh Holden knows: The market tells so. Josh Holden counts as an import-player. Import-players come from all over the world and to replace players like Josh Holden you just need good scouting and good networking. Yes, it’s not so easy to replace the quality of Josh Holden. That’s why he deserves to have an above-average salary compared to other import-players and he has this but I do insist: You can replace Josh Holden, you have a fair chance if you do your homework. Can you replace Rafael Diaz? No, you can’t – he is one of the top-five Swiss defensemen in our league and we have 10 teams…so… you have to have him because you can’t replace him. He is Swiss and doesn’t hurt the import-licence-contingent. So again: My first answer to the question of whether Diaz is overpaid or not: No – he isn’t .

What about Bengt-Ake Gustafsson, one of the most famous coaches in the hockey-world? I do not know his salary but I still dare to tell that he is most probably overpaid. As a coach he has just limited influence to what happens on the ice. I definitely think that the Lions could have found e.g. a local coach for half the money with the same impact. But of course the pressure is big for a big-name coach after firing the former assistant and no-name-headcoach Colin Muller. The logical but completely wrong conclusion to this is: Not again a former assistant and not again a no-name-coach. The right conclusion would be: We will try to find the best possible coach and will find out this in structured interviews and analyses and of course this coach can be found everywhere (from local assistant-coaches to exotic headcoaches in Siberia). The hiring of Bengt-Ake Gustafsson does in my eyes not have the same long-term-value-ratio than the on first sight expensive contract-extension of Rafael Diaz.

But also this view is just the view of a GM who watches the world from the local Zurich-mountain, Uetliberg. The real good GM looks at it as an eagle from the Mount-Everest – ornithologists will forgive me this example because they will probably prove me that eagles can’t survive in the heights of Mount Everest…but in this, my example, they simply can J. The eagle-eye just watches from wuthering heights and finds the bloodlines of B.A. Gustafsson, so I come to the conclusion that:

Just average-influence coach B.A. Gustafsson  (my opinion) will maybe still be the diamond in the rough for the ZSC Lions because he has a son, Anton. Anton Gustafsson has a Swiss licence because he played as a junior first for Feldkirch in Austria and for some reason this Feldkirch-licence is equal to a Swiss licence…hmmm… I don’t want to go deeper into this but it’s just a fact. Anton Gustafsson is an excellent young hockey-player, a former first-round-pick of the Washington Capitals. He suffered various injuries in the last couple of years and is not on the level yet where he would be without injuries. Means, he didn’t get an NHL-contract , was demoted even to the ECHL a couple of weeks ago and returned home to Sweden highly frustrated, even considering quitting hockey. Fortunately there is a gold-mine in the Swiss league for him. He is not an import-player like Josh Holden and he is not as good as Josh Holden yet but still he has strategically the higher market-value than Josh Holden because you can’t replace him. He has the potential to be as good as the best imports in our league without being an import and this means a potential salary of close to 1 Mio! Of course he won’t get this salary right away – he first has to show what he can do. Although I do know for sure that not the ZSC-Lions had the first idea to hire Anton as a Swiss player – the ZSC Lions are definitely in the pole-position to do so, thank’s to his father Bengt-Ake Gustafsson. I guess you know what I mean: Not the actual performance dictates the value of a player in our Swiss league, if this would be the case Josh Holden would be the best paid player. It’s the market. And the market tells that we just have a handful of good “import-players” who are no “import-players” and the market tells that we just have a handful a really good defensemen with a Swiss passport in our league and the market tells that if you do a good job in preparing the hiring of import-players you have a decent chance to replace Josh Holden but you can’t replace a healthy Dan Fritsche, Christian Dube, Ryan Gardner and a healthy Anton Gustafsson. Personally I did like Anton Gustafsson as a junior-player so much that I was 100% sure that he never ever will play in our league. He is an excellent two-way-forward, responsible, gritty and on a good overall skill-level. Unfortunately for him and fortunately for our league his various injuries did guide his career into an unexpected direction.

So, in the very end…if the Lions will land a healthy and motivated Anton Gustafsson…the hiring of his father as the head-coach was a good and wise move! The eagle-eye tells me this...

Thomas Roost / 25th October 2010