Player isn't required to fix team's errors, this is up to the managers

Player isn't required to fix team's errors
Dave Perkins

Original post from TheStar.com article 306777

Once again, the lesson has been delivered to Toronto, if not learned.

The player's job, in any sport, is to play. The player's job is not to help manage the team or to massage payroll. That is up to the managers.

The Maple Leafs, operating as usual at full blunder, have handled the Mats Sundin question poorly from the start right through the finish that everyone – particularly Sundin – hopes arrived Sunday.

The Leafs didn't learn a single thing from history and Cliff Fletcher surely should have known better than to hang a class act like Sundin out to dry the way they did. This surely wouldn't have been Fletcher's intent, but it's the result.

Less than four years ago, the same thing happened with Carlos Delgado, when the still-newish general manager of the Blue Jays, J.P. Ricciardi, assumed that Delgado, making an unwieldy $18.5 million (U.S.) in the final year of his contract, would give up his rights to veto a trade to a contender, which the Jays surely were not.

Ricciardi probably made a mistake of inexperience, publicly heaping responsibility on Delgado to forgo his right to live up to his end of a contract negotiated in good faith. Ricciardi wanted Delgado to facilitate his own departure as the first step in remaking the Jays in a different and cheaper manner and assumed he would take the chance to seek a ring elsewhere.

Delgado, who did not appreciate being hung out like that, said no. The betting here is that Ricciardi, older and wiser, will handle things differently if the situation arises again with a megastar.

That said, Fletcher knows his way around the block. He shouldn't have made the same mistake, which is publicly setting up the long-time captain to take heat, much of it undeserved and most of it based on the fact that he happened to be born in Sweden.

Sundin was forced into a no-win position and Fletcher, who was brought here to hit a home run at today's trading deadline, now would be happy to bloop in a double somewhere.

It's typical of the Maple Leafs, though, isn't it? Other than making money, can they do anything right? (And even there, how many millions do they leave on the table every year now by constantly mismanaging the brand's chief asset.)

No doubt Fletcher walked into a tough spot by taking over an underperforming hockey team hamstrung by a number of no-trade clauses. It's fashionable to blame the departed John Ferguson Jr. for handing out those contracts, but Ferguson did so in every case with the board of directors approving and presumably endorsing each move with their collective hockey acumen.

Now, the common response is the opposite: Fletcher and his successor (the lucky fellow) are being encouraged to grant no more no-trade security to any future Leafs. This, then, all but assures Sundin's time in Toronto expires in 18 games. Last summer, after taking his time to reach a decision, he chose to sign a one-year contract with the no-trade clause. So how is it possible that he could sign another contract this summer without one? If he sought it at age 36, he'll need it at age 37 – and so on.

Sundin, a good soldier for this club, on and off the ice, for a long time, deserves to finish his Leafs career as gracefully as possible. The club negotiated and signed a contract – a contract it now needs to honour – without having a gun put to its head. Yet it turned around and put one ever so publicly to Sundin's.