#0: Lynx (Last Week: -1). The Lynx tore through the screening Week with a vengeance, soundly beating the Aces last Friday (I think Minnesota has Las Vegas' number, at least when it comes to women's professional basketball) and then destroying the Sparks in Los Angeles Sunday. And the Lynx beat both teams on the road. They reach the Olympic Break with the fourth-best record in the WNBA and a seven-Game winning streak. This squad has done enough to capture the top spot in the WMNSS and to be elevated above negative numbers.
Sylvia Fowles and Napheesa Collier are the two local representatives for Team USA women's basketball team. Good luck at the Olympics, although I think women's basketball remains the most one-sided sport in the Summer Games. I'm expecting the USA to capture the gold medal running away, and I think players on that team feel that same way.
This team is now dark for about the next Month.
#-1: Twins (Last Week: -2). They finished the first half of the 2021 season by winning the last three Games of, and thus sweeping, the four-Game series against Detroit over the weekend at Target Field. But I think Twinks fans have been wizened up to the fact that this ballclub has demonstrated mini-spurts like this already this Year vs. shitty teams and it has not ushered in a turnaround.
Nope, a fire sale remains the most likely next chapter. And yet there was late word late last/Thursday night that the Twins have offered to Byron Buxton a long-term deal that would pay a total of $70 million. That projected deal actually is a Rorschach test for Twins fans: Is it a steal for the organization, or is it money you're throwing into an underwater fire? At first blush it looks as though the front office is walking that fine line between giving Buck enough money to make him feel appreciated while also hedging against his long, proven injury history which, by the way, extends to now because he is still fucking hurt. It's weird to think of it this way, but if accepted, this offer may never be met with commensurate value. Buxton could spend two-thirds of every Year on this contract in the IL, thus making this a bad deal. Or, Buck can stay healthy and give an MVP-level performance throughout the season and every season thereafter, thus making this deal a good one. I am of the belief that Buxton has a pattern of injuries, so I would sooner trade him. And Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic (who broke this story) believes that if Buxton rejects this deal, Twins brass will then make a concerted effort to trade him -- if not by this Year's Trade Deadline, which is on the 30th, then during the off-season.
Anyway, The Second Half Of The Season begins with the hometown nine on the road -- four Games apiece at the Tigers and then the White Sox, both series taking place only over three Days because the first Day for both series will be Doubleheaders because these guys are making up Rainouts. They come back home Thursday to start a four-Game set (spread out over four Days) versus The Anaheim Angels Of Los Angeles Angels Of Anaheim Angels Of ...
On Tuesday, Wild General Manager Bill Guerin announced that the organization was buying out the final four Years of the contracts of both Zach Parise and Ryan Suter. Back on the 4th of July of 2012, both Free Agents signed with the Wild for matching contracts of 13 Years and $98 million apiece. The announcement was made with a grand, freewheeling press conference at the Xcel Energy Center with both blue-chippers (at least at the time) present. The announcement of their departures, held Tuesday afternoon, was at least held in-person, but obviously with neither Parise or Suter present.
There was some talk that Parise would be on the move this offseason by hook or by crook. His play has declined to where it is nowhere near the level of someone being paid an average of over $7 million a Year. He has been injured off-and-on the past few seasons. And the final dagger of Parise's stay in Minnesota may have ended with that Game against Las Vegas where he was supposed to end his shift but stayed on because he wanted help Marcus Foligno get a Hat Trick, but then got caught flat-footed on a rush by the Golden Knights (who played with an extra skater) and whose stick deflected a Vegas shot towards the Wild's net for the tying Goal. Las Vegas would eventually win in Overtime. Head Coach Dean Evason made him put out a statement explaining why he extended his own shift, and then he scratched Parise for the next contest, only the second time in his career he was a healthy scratch ... up to that point. He was a healthy scratch for much of the rest of the regular season, and only an injury to Marcus Johansson allowed Parise to even suit up for the playoff series vs. the GKs -- where, to his credit, his toughness and veteran savvy was a contributor to reviving the team and pushing the series to the full seven Games.
Suter has been more puzzling. As he aged, he filtered down in playing time, but by all accounts he was still a solid second Defenseman pairing. He too might not have been justifying the money he made this Year, or even the past couple. But there was no indication from Wild brass that he was going to be shown the door four Years before his contract was up. Word is Suter was absolutely blindsided by the buyout. According to Michael Russo of The Athletic, Guerin had to call Suter twice; when he finally got Suter the second time to break the news, Suter hung up on him.
So is this another step in the evolution of, according to Guerin, changing the culture in the locker room? There has been talk that since Parise and Suter were given such big and long contracts, and then were hailed as conquering heroes in St. Paul, they ran the place. (I don't know how much of a package deal those two were, but any talk that the inmates were running the asylum pointed way more in Parise's direction than Suter's.) If those two carried themselves with the self-absorption and even arrogance they were sometimes portrayed, well, I can see why Guerin decided to pull the trigger on this.
But let's try to process all the ramifications of these buyouts. First, by doing this, the franchise still has to eat dead money as part of its salary cap. Buyouts allow teams to stretch the remaining contract for several Years. For the Wild, that comes to about $4.7 million next Year, $12.7 million the next, then $14.7 million the following four Years before ebbing to about $1.6 million for four final Years.
The two pressing issues for this squad now (well, besides the Expansion Draft, and now that they bought out both Parise and Suter, there's little-to-no worry that they'll lose Matt Dumba to the Seattle Kraken) is signing Kirill Kaprizov and Kevin Fiala to long-term contracts. Plus, they still need to find a Center, and fill out their roster with other players.
Now, imagine a graph of the savings these buyouts give the team, it starts out low for next Year, then balloons to an atmospheric level for the next five before crashing down after that. The Wild don't have much room to tuck in both contracts under the cap as it is. But the way it looks right now is Guerin has one Year to find the pieces to build this team and, let's face it, make a run for the Stanley Cup before the ghosts of Parise and Suter's contracts really haunt this organization with a combined eight-figure handcuff for the 2022 through 2025 seasons. These financial hijinks are acceptable for a team that is starting a rebuild. They're acceptable for an outfit that's in win-now mode. But for a team that's at least one and more like two players away, I'm afraid they have put themselves in a precarious spot where they can go all-in with a half-filled, still-budding squad that might need to be blown up for the 2022-3 season.
Not to say that they weren't in a shitty spot before Tuesday. You had two high-priced, over-the-hill vets experiencing the downside of contracts that mainly people had foreseen would be ridiculously over-valued at this point. But while they weren't $7.5 mill apiece, they were not the worst skaters on the ice most Games. They still have contributions to make; Parise earned much of his keep in the playoffs, and Suter still can pull down 15-20 Minutes a night. And this isn't the NFL where you can restructure contracts; otherwise, Guerin and the two players' agents would be down for that two Years ago.
So, the contracts are the contracts. Why not, you know, honor the contracts to their bitter ends? Or, put in a different way, would buying out the both of them, thus giving this club the salary cap space to find players that supposedly would put the team in a better place, be better than living under the previous financial situation where you just kept both? I'm not sure the answer is yes. It might be better to keep both players on -- at almost a $15 million hit to the cap until 2024, when their contracts are done -- and hope that they can become role players on the ice and at least good presences in the locker room. And if they choose to be cancers instead, they just stick around for four more Years.
But let's take a step back and start from the beginning. How in the hell did the Wild get themselves in such a predicament? Owner Craig Leipold had a big hand in courting both to Minnesota. It appears as though both teammates wanted long, lucrative contracts that would mirror each other. For such high-priced moves, contracts have to have the blessing of the Owner. So why in the fuckety-fuck did Leipold consent to a combined $196 million over thirteen Years for two guys who many people knew would peter out like this? Shouldn't Leipold shoulder some of the blame for acceding to the pie-in-the-sky demands of two players in their prime because of the payback that's coming to his team now? I don't care if you have prime Wayne Gretzky to negotiate with; never, ever give out a contract that long, and you sure as fuck don't give out two. (Note also that even though Guerin probably is the one who originated the idea of buying out Suter and Parise, a move that large had to have the personal go-ahead by the Owner -- the same guy who okayed their contracts back in 2012.)
The only reason I could still see Leipold's agreeing to two long, onerous contracts was the state of the Wild in 2012. After reviving pro hockey in the state, the streak of sellouts came to an end. They were missing the playoff more than they were in it. Such feelings may have been spurred by the theft of our beloved Minnesota North Stars, but this organization was freefalling into indifference and invisibility. Leipold, who had recently bought the club from Jac Sperling, needed to jumpstart some interest from the community. And this "power play" was just the ticket to, uh, sell tickets.
But I harken back to that introductory news conference nine Years ago. A reporter asked Leipold (I think; I can't find the transcript) that if Parise and Suter does not win this state a Stanley Cup, or even just getting to the Finals, would he consider that to be a disappointment. And I think Leipold replied that because of these two moves, he thought one, maybe two Stanley Cup Finals victories was a standard he thought he had every right to expect from the team from now on. Now, the ancillary marketing shot in the arm was the precise thing the Wild needed to curry interest from the Twin Cities fan base. But, if you take Leipold's words from that presser and apply it to the nine seasons Ryan Suter and Zach Parise had with the team as a whole, their stay in a Wild sweater, unfortunately and brutally but truthfully, was a severe disappointment. Fuck the Stanley Cup; the Wild never got out of the Second Round in any of the Years those two were in St. Paul. Leipold the rich family he married into had a right to be worried over the future of this club. He also has the right to change course and decide that these two saviors have now become the Minnesota Wild's two anchors. 'Cause he is the Owner.
I'm afraid these buyouts commence a lose-lose-lose scenario. One thing I do know is that history sometimes rhymes like a bitch: The two most popular players on the Wild team for the past decade came to the State Of Hockey together, and now they've been thrown out of the State Of Hockey together.
No comments:
Post a Comment