Hockey Players Really Care About Their Salary
Like, they really, really care about how much they are paid in comparison to other hockey players. A player's AAV is a sign of how much the coach and team value them as much as it is about getting paid. Negotiating an AAV is staking a claim about who your performance is going to be comparable to.
Hockey is a hard cap sport, so there is a limited pool of money and owners can't even buy their way out of it with a luxury tax, like basketball. Yet top hockey players regularly demand 15-16% of the cap space even as it starves the bottom of their roster and turns it into an unstable rotation. This directly impacts their ability to be consistent in the playoffs and reach the Stanley Cup, but it's still prevalent, because this is not an individual preference, it is a cultural attitude within the sport.
It's why Celebrini wanted $18.8m AAV so that he would be paid more than Leo Carlsson's $18m AAV and only gave a 5 year term so that his salary can be raised along with the cap. If he had taken $13m AAV, he would have made more than $100 million dollars before he turned 30, so it's not a matter of needing the money. It's why Jason Robertson took a single bridge year (risky in a full contact, high injury sport) rather than a $100 million over 8 year contract, because he knows his performance is most comparable to players who have higher AAV contracts and he refuses to be measured as less than them. Montreal's Suzuki's contract looks great now, but it was a fair deal when it was negotiated.
There is no such thing as a hometown discount that applies to the city you are born in. The hometown discount refers to the city that drafted you, because that is the city your career was born in. This drives me legitimately crazy. Stop using a term that really exists to describe something completely different. Professional athletes aren't handing out discounts to play for their birthplace.
The only major stars giving substantial discounts are Crosby (for superstitious numerology reasons, although his first contract was a huge % of cap back in the day) and McDavid (who is becoming genuinely desperate to win a cup before his window closes). Neither of these applies to Shane. 3 time Stanley Cup winner, 1C captain Shane Hollander giving a huge discount to a new, very mid team in order to play on their second line is loser behavior. It's desperate. If his peer group didn't think he was cheating before, they absolutely do now. If he's willing to abandon all self-respect as evidenced by his salary, why wouldn't he abandon his self-respect and cheat?
There are absolutely ways to clear cap space. If in two years, McDavid decided to move to Montreal, Montreal would trade away whoever was necessary to make room, including leaning on players with No Move clauses to rescind them, like they did to Gallagher when they wanted to clear his cap space. For Ottawa to sign him to a discount means that the team's leadership is telling fans and the broader hockey community that they don't value Shane and they are signing him as a favor to their star player Rozanov, which is a wild way to end your "fluffy" romance novel.
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