A Carolina Hurricanes blog with occasional news about the rest of the NHL.

Monday, June 18, 2007

Flyers, Preds tamper.

On Monday afternoon, the Hamilton Predators and Flyers announced that they have negotiated a deal which returns a "conditional" draft pick from Philly to Nashville in exchange for exclusive rights to negotiate with Scott Hartnell and defenseman Kimmo Timonen. Both are were considered to be high profile free agents-to-be.

The TSN story is here.

This isn't a sign-n-trade. Nashville didn't sign the players first. The players are still scheduled to and WILL become free agents on July 1. However, Philly will have "exclusive" rights to negotiate with them. No other team will have the right to tender a sheet at that point.

Does someone want to tell me why this isn't considered to be tampering? Collusion? If the other teams are locked out, isn't that tantamount to allowing Philly to tender a sheet before July 1? Am I missing something?

EDIT ---> Apparently, Philly has signed these two players to long-term deals. Hartnell : 6 years for a total of $25.2M. Timonen: 6 years for a total of $37.8M.

Remember, this isn't being referred to as a "trade". Trades are fine. This kind of negotiation smells fishy to me. Even if it is referred to as a "trade", this is still fishy as hell. Two top notch players for one draft pick?

As if there wasn't enough sketchiness going on in Nashville, now there's this.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

If there's no roster freeze (and I don't believe there is), I'm not sure how it's tampering... their NHL rights still belonged to Nashville, then they belonged to Philadelphia. If the Habs can trade Samsonov to Chicago, why can't the Preds trade Hartnell and Timonen?

I think the answer to why Nashville let them go can be seen in the amounts for which they signed. Not counting the cap hit though, Philly wins this deal hands down.

JP said...

What would be tampering (if I understand correctly) is if the Flyers and the two players had negotiated deals prior to the trade, and there's every reason to believe that they might have, or else why would Philly have given up the pick - just for the chance to negotiate, hoping they could sign the two? Sounds steep to me.

I wrote more about it , if you're interested.

d-lee said...

Mike,
It's actually pretty simple. Nobody screamed "tampering" about the Samsonov deal simply because he wasn't scheduled to be a free agent. He signed a two-year deal in the summer of '06, and was therefore not going to be on the FA market.

When this deal was initally announced, it was worded carefully not to indicate that Philly had acquired the players, but rather the exclusive rights to negotiate with them. Later, they signed "contract extensions" with their new club. If this doesn't scream COLLUSION, I don't know what does.
JP doesn't necessarily agree, but I highly recommend his well written post on the matter.

Anonymous said...

Seriously stop crying.

if your gm had this brilliant idea like homer pulled off and have a owner is willing to do anything to win you wouldnt be making these comments about flyers

it was a bold move by flyers.

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