Still trying to wrap my head around the Eric Belanger situation. Not that it matters much at this point. The Caps have moved on and hope they can fill their second and third-line center spots internally. Belanger has signed a one-year contract with the Phoenix Coyotes for $750,000 – substantially less than the $1.85 million oral agreement he and agent Joe Tacopina had with the Caps on July 16, but a job nonetheless in an environment where plenty of veteran players remain out in the cold.
Check out this blog post from Caps senior staff writer Mike Vogel. It gives the picture from the team’s perspective. What’s not in dispute is that an oral offer of $1.85 million was made and accepted – pending a trade on Washington’s end. According to Vogel, the Caps at that time still weren’t sure how much money forward Tomas Fleischmann would get in arbitration. He eventually settled for a one-year, $2.6 million deal before his scheduled July 28 hearing. And the Caps also needed salary-cap space to make a run at Vancouver defenseman Willie Mitchell. Washington eventually lost him to the Los Angeles Kings on Aug. 25 when Mitchell signed a two-year, $7 million contract.
But we appear to have a Murphy’s Law situation here. Tacopina, according to an e-mail he sent to the Toronto-based Globe and Mail newspaper, became worried when Caps assistant general manager Don Fishman kept telling him the expected trade still wasn’t finished two weeks into August. He was somewhat assuaged when team services manager Ian Anderson began helping the Belanger family with the move – giving advice on a real-estate agent to find a home, sending a moving company to prepare to pack his belongings in Minnesota, e-mailing training-camp information, etc.
Unfortunately, Belanger himself started a string of media reports on Aug. 11 when he told Canadian French-language newspaper Le Soleil that he had agreed to terms with an NHL team, but couldn’t say which one because it was working on a trade. The Globe and Mail confirmed that report the next day, adding the dollar amount and the nugget that Fleischmann was one player the Caps were looking to move to clear room for a defenseman. We already know the team was a finalist for Mitchell. It certainly wasn’t in Washington’s best interests to leak any of that information. It’s probably no coincidence that Fishman called Tacopina on Aug. 17 to say that if he and Belanger were getting “restless” without a signed contract they should probably “move on.”
“If I could have reached through the phone at that point and grabbed somebody by the neck I would have done it,” Tacopina told Toronto radio station The Fan 590 on Wednesday afternoon in a remarkable public admission. “Because the time to say that was on July 16th, 17th or 18th. Not on August 19th.”
Tacopina’s e-mail, obtained by the Globe and Mail, actually was sent Aug. 17, but point taken. Vogel reports that McPhee made several calls to Belanger in the last two weeks, offering him the chance to skate with Caps players at Kettler Iceplex and an invitation to training camp while he waited for another offer. That was too little, too late for the player, obviously.
Vogel is critical of Tacopina for failing to land Belanger a deal in July when the free-agent market was at its apex. That’s fair. Taking the word of a general manager and waiting five weeks while the market evaporates doesn’t seem like the move of an experienced agent. And, of course, Tacopina isn’t. For years he was a renowned defense attorney in New York. Belanger told us all at breakdown day after last spring’s Game 7 first-round playoff loss to Montreal that he had just signed with Tacopina’s agency – Madison Avenue Sports and Entertainment – to negotiate his upcoming contract. The company was founded in 2009.
But doesn’t Tacopina also have a point that everything the Caps did prior to Aug. 11 signaled a team set on finalizing a deal? It’s almost a perfect storm of miscommunication and mistrust. We have an inexperienced agent trying to read the tea leaves from an organization not known for its transparency as his client gets antsy. We have media leaks that put the team in a bad spot and may have angered Washington’s front office. Was it just a slip by Belanger? After all, he admitted in Le Soleil that he wasn’t supposed to talk.
Whatever happened, the latest media blitz has opened a window into the business of professional sports. These interactions between agents and teams happen behind closed doors for a reason and rarely is it in either sides’ interest to expose the real inner workings of a negotiation. Anonymous leaks to reporters are one thing and both sides routinely engage in it. But sending out internal e-mails and conversations is another. An agent never knows when a client will need a job and an NHL general manager never knows when his club will need a defenseman. In this case we have actually witnessed bridges getting napalmed, which is always fun, but does nothing good for the partied involved.
“I have a client to represent and I will do everything I can to represent my client within the boundaries,” Tacopina told The Fan 590. “And if someone does something that I think is really wrong to a client I’m not going to hold my tongue. That’s not who I am. I don’t need to be buddies with anybody. And I’ll protect my clients ferociously. I spoke to a half-dozen – almost a dozen – general managers in the last two weeks trying to figure out if there was another home for Eric that was a good fit at this late stage. Not one had anything terrific to say about the actions of the Washington general manager. Not one. And some of them did not claim that they were too surprised.”
Okay, Tacopina won’t be running the George McPhee fan club anytime soon. But color me not shocked that some of McPhee’s 29 competitors don’t like him. Just covering the Nationals this summer we learned how testy the trade negotiations for first baseman Adam Dunn became between Washington general manager Mike Rizzo and Chicago White Sox general manager Kenny Williams. It’s the nature of the business. Tacopina said he and Belanger were “weighing all of these things” in regards to legal action. In reality, they likely don’t have a case without a signed contract. Best bet for everyone is to just move on. But it’s not the way either Belanger or the Caps wanted to start the 2010-11 season.
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