The challenge of the New York Rangers, SC Bern, ZSC Lions with aging star-players

“Loyalty that is bought with money, may be overcome by money.” SENECA

Actually this quote tells a lot about what I try to explain in this blog.

In these days a lot of opinions and explanations about loyalty from team with players can be found in Swiss media. Legendary players who are in the winter of their careers fight for new contracts and not always it comes to a “happy end” for the players. Two years ago there was the Davos village-farce with the Von Arx brothers, right now there is a big rah-rah-rah about the SC Bern and Martin Plüss and also there is something brewing with the ZSC Lions and Mathias Seger. All these situations have something in common. Great, aging players who played many years for the same organisation, were part of championship-teams and this in leading roles. The same goes for Mark Messier when he captained the New York Rangers 1994 to their first Stanley Cup since 1940. 

These “icons” became older and the new player-generation, in average better trained, educated and more skilled, started to make pressure and the organisations had and have to decide about a new contract.

There is a lot of talk about loyalty and thankfulness again when reading about Martin Plüss, SCB and Mathias Seger, ZSC Lions in these days. I don’t agree with the sometimes emotional discussions because I can’t see lack of loyalty from the teams in all these cases. For me loyalty happens a lot in all our teams but not so much on the professional level. There are hundreds of volunteers in each pro-sports-team who spend thousands of hours of their lives for their organisation and they don’t get paid more than sometimes a sausage and a parka with the team-logo. They never question the conditions the club offers them, they just do their job, year after year. This is loyalty.

On a pro-level it’s pure business. Here we have the organisation, the team, the club and there is the athlete. Both are interested to do some business and negotiate the conditions. Here is the position of the team and there is the position of the athlete. In negotiations you never hold on to your starting-point, you never get a maximum-deal. It’s always some sort of compromise, a compromise both parties can agree with and in the end is a mutual commitment. We pay you this and that for a certain time and you play hockey for us as good as possible. Beyond this nobody owes anything to the other party, it’s as simple as that. The problem is that a lot of fans – and sometimes the decision-takers in the clubs are too much fans – expect to pay money to a legendary player for something he did do in the past for the club and too easily forget that he got paid for this already. In the case of Plüss he definitely did get some extra-bonus for becoming champion last season and he will get the same if the SCB wins again. So, the focus of the club in terms of a new contract shall never be on the past but on the anticipated future. A classical case of such a mistake was when Mark Messier in the late autumn of his career captained the New York Rangers to the Stanley Cup and after that he negotiated a typical contract for what he did do in the past (although he had a pretty good contract in the past) and not for what should be anticipated for the future. The Rangers paid a big price for this contract, even the basically rich Rangers suffered some years. I guess everybody knows what Messier meant for the Rangers and what he did bring to the table in the Stanley Cup season but still – he had a contract for this and did get good money, from an economical point of view the Rangers didn’t owe him anything and he didn’t owe anything to the Rangers. They had a good time and some success together but they were even. The same situation with Reto Von Arx in Davos and now with Martin Plüss and Mathias Seger. The pure business point of view is that they still offer something for their teams but not as much as they did in their prime. So it would be stupid for the SCB or the ZSC Lions not to offer something and would have been stupid for the HCD not to offer anything to Reto Von Arx. But the big question is: What kind of contract for how much money should they offer?

That’s why I guess it’s absolutely useless to judge the cases of Plüss and Seger because just a couple of people know exactly what is or what was on the table. It’s clear that with older age the level of playing hockey is regressing and the risk of injuries is increasing. Some players are aging faster than others but cases like Jaromir Jagr are really exceptions. So, what to offer to players like Plüss and Seger? Definitely a short-term contract for lesser money compared to the old contracts, also Jagr plays for significantly less than he did get in his prime. Of course the player and his agent are watching this from a different perspective. They of course try to carry the past into the contract-negotiations and – not only in our league – they become quite often successful with this rhetoric. A compromise could be a strictly bonus-ladden contract: Small basic-salary with huge bonuses if the player reaches the level he did in the past and he still believes he will be able to deliver also in future. In times with advanced stats and analytics it’s more easy to fairly judge a players level and I guess this should be the way to deal with older players.

I don’t see any reason starting to discuss about thankfulness, loyality or bring even morality and ethic points into the mix. This has absolutely nothing to do with this. Contract negotiations should be always a strict business-decision – by the way it is the same from the players point of view – there is no room for sentimentalities unless you have more or less equal contract-offers. I do know that a fan looks at it with completely different eyes and forgets sometimes that if he, as an employee, gets a better offer from another company he also seriously thinks about a change, the same do the companies and do the hockey-clubs – the SCB now has Gaetan Haas and maybe even Nico Hischier for next season and this definitely didn’t raise the value of Martin Plüss from the SCB point of view. The Lions have a couple of promising young defensemen in the pipeline and this also doesn’t raise the value of Mathias Seger in the eyes of the Lions decision-takers.

"Cult-Picture" ZSC captain Seger carries home the championship-trophy by tram :-)

In the very end I want to thank Mark Messier, the Von Arx brothers, Martin Plüss and Mathias Seger for what they did and will do for our sport, the sport of hockey: Leaders, role-models, great character and high-level hockey. They all deserve to be remembered and honoured as some of the greatest players in their leagues ever. They all deserved and will deserve a huge, pathetic good-bye party, a retired shirt under the roof, life-time hero-status with the fans and Plüss and Seger deserve a new contract but for probably not the conditions they are looking for.

Horgen, 19^th February 2017 / Thomas Roost                                                       RoostBlog190217Loyalty.docx