Overpaying for Smyth.

Given that this might all be moot in the next 24 hours, I may as well write something down now.

I think a differentiation has to be made between what Ryan Smyth is worth to the Edmonton Oilers Hockey Club and what he's worth to the Edmonton Investors Group.

Ryan Smyth and the Oilers have been negotiating a new contract for him for the last few months. Given Smyth's status as an Oiler (in fitting with the topic, use all the cliches you want, "heart 'n soul", "bleeds oil" "face of the franchise" etc) it's obviously a big deal in Oil Country (which I think is an attempt to ape the Red Sox Nation branding move). Apparently they're not far apart, Smyth is asking for somewhat over $25MM over 5 seasons and the Oilers offering $20MM over four. Roughly.

With the Oilers, salaries have to be balanced twice, both against the cap and against the pocketbook of the EIG. A look around the Oilogosphere will tell you that there's some suspicion over just how much the EIG has to spend on players salaries, that they cry poor while pocketing alot more than they let on. I'm no business student, so I don't really get into that myself. But from the basic looks of it, the critics are right, the oilers have a pretty high per-game gate revenue and just came off a huge moneymaker of a playoff run, all while aided by a large growth in the value of the CDN dollar over the last few years.

In any case, with the salary cap going up again next and the probability that the Oilers won't be spending that high no matter how much they're actually making, I'm not sure that an argument against overpaying Smyth because of salary cap concerns makes sense.

The argument for overpaying him (for an example, lets say paying him anywhere over 5.5 per) because of the restrictions on the EIG pocketbook is a little stronger. This is all assuming that the EIG does indeed make money, and will again this year.

It's safe to say that Smyth is indeed the face of the Oilers franchise. He's a (mostly) local boy, one of the few (or the only) draft picks from the 90's to actually make on the team and succeed. He's played his whole career in Edmonton, which is rare enough these days. What is that kind of story and myth worth to the EIG? What does he mean to the fans? I don't have any stats, but I'd be quite willing to bet that Smyth sweaters are the biggest sellers in Edmonton, by far.
The Oilers have been milking the glory years for a while now, what with the number retirements and banner replacements and whatnot, but eventually that'll run out. As an example, they're retiring Messier's number tomorrow night, and I'd bet they're gonna retire Lowe's number someday as well. And after that? From the last 17 years, who is there they could possibly retire? If they wanna follow the Flames lead (Vernon?) and do some reaching, they could do Bill Ranford's number 30 maybe...
But if Smyth plays his entire career in Edmonton, regardless of whether he wins a Cup or not, I don't see why he wouldn't get his 94 retired somewhere down the line.
Being able to give your franchise a face must be worth something in the long haul, even if it's not quantifiable. Being able to say "look, our players are loyal to you, so you can be loyal to them" to the fans must count for something, no? If some fans long for the days when a player spent his entire career with one team and was identified as such (Yzerman in Detroit, Beliveau in MTL, Bossy on the Island, Neely in Boston) what does it mean to them to have a player on their team do that?

So if Ryan Smyth the hockey player is worth say $4.5 - 5.0MM as a productive player to the Edmonton Oilers Hockey Club, what is Ryan Smyth the "face of the franchise" worth to the Edmonton Investors Group? Another $1MM per year? .5MM? It's gotta be something, no? And if it doesn't affect the Oilers salary cap concerns, what's the EIG so concerned about?

IMOJ

At the end of Home Game, Dryden and MacGregor finally tie it all together. They've written this big book about hockey and Canada, from a number of topics, and finally they have to explain why this whole thing was worth writing in the first place, why it actually means anything.
If I had the book here, I could quote the relevant parts properly. Unfortunately, all I have is the following, but it's enough to get the basic point across.

“Why should this game matter? Why does it matter? It matters because communities matter. ... Dreams, hopes, passions; common stories, common experiences, common memories; myths and legends; ... links, bonds, connections - young-old, past-present, East-West, French-English, men-women, able-disabled ... they matter. And that is why hockey matters.”

A year ago on February 19th my cousin Jeff was killed in a car accident. He was six years younger than I, so there was a bit of an age gap. I remember being disappointed in myself that the majority of my memories of time with him were hockey related.

Playing mini-stick hockey in his and our basements when we were really young, playing hockey in Grandpa's basement when we were a bit older, which we did for hours at just about every family holiday there. Road hockey at any relatives gathering. Playing hockey on my dad's 50th birthday party when Jeff put the pads back on and started playing net again.
One of my strongest memories was from Christmas 2004. We were in Burlington, and I suggested to my cousins and uncles that everyone bring their skates and sticks along and we'd find an outdoor rink somewhere. We ended up finding the worst rink I've ever played on, it was as though someone had thrown a hose down in a parking lot and left it at that. I remember our skates would spark as they hit gravel left in the ice or went right through. Jeff kept wiping out because his goalie skates were even worse at gripping the ice than ours were, I was surprised that he was even able to skate at all.

I was disappointed because I felt like I should have more memories of him than just hockey related things, he's my cousin, we're supposed to share more than just that.

But at the funeral home, I realized just how big a role hockey played in his life. Former teammates from all age levels showed up and signed his goalie stick. The picture book was full of hockey pictures. One of the flower baskets had a ministick in it. A family friend brought some things Jeff had given him, one was a wooden ministick from a time I'd long forgotten about, making them with my cousins so we could design and draw on them ourselves.

And I realised at some point, that without hockey, what memories might I have had? We were six years apart in age, and I spent four of my years growing up on another continent. Without hockey, would there have been as much for me to remember in the first place? Would there have been something else in place of those links created by hockey? I can't answer that obviously, but I'm not sure what else might have had the same effect.

These links/bonds/connections of hockey are evident throughout my extended family. Every single one of my male cousins on both sides have played organized hockey at some point, and the majority of us still do play in some form or another. I'm pretty sure it's the same with all the uncles. We've made it a habit in the last couple years to schedule our Christmas dinner around the opening game of the World Junior Championships. We need this as a connection, as a way of keeping track of each other and connecting outside the usual family occasions. And it helps us understand each other in some small way.

So here's to common experiences and common memories and relationships and hockey. And here's to Jeff, staring down Rocket Richard and Valerie Kharlamov on a two on none.

A thin slice of ice.

Malcolm Gladwell had a pretty famous book a bit ago called Blink, which was essentially about how making snap decisions (called Thin-Slicing) without actually thinking can often be the best course of action, assuming you're opperating in your own area of expertise. The example from the begining of the book is one where an art museum buys a statue which initially is thought to be real but later proven to be fake. The second group of experts who examined the statue needed but one look, a single glance to know that something wasn't right. They couldn't explain why they knew it was fake, they just did.

So the other morning I was watching bits of the Blue Jackets - Oilers game from a few nights/mornings ago. At one point in the second, Horcoff et al. were coming in on a three on three. Horc carried it up to the blueline and dished it off.... right then, I knew something was wrong, even before the whistle went. I was only half watching Horcoff, paying more attention to the Oiler at the top of the screen (Smyth I think), but as soon as Horcoff crossed the blueline, some sort of ... I dunno, alert... went through my head. After the whistle went to indicate the offside, I didn't really think anything of it for a few seconds. Then I realized I wasn't actually sure where the offside had been. Had it been Smyth at the top of the screen? Was it Hemsky? Did Horc carry the puck over the line and then pass it back across? Where was the infraction exactly? I rewound and watched the scene again.... too fast, too many players and moves to track. Even then, I could still tell something was wrong. I slowed it down at watched it at third time, and this time I finally understood that it was none of the above, Horcoff had dished it off to Hemsky about six inches before he crossed the line, putting himself offside. The puck was sitting on the blueline, inches from the Columbus zone while Horcoff's skate was no more than an inch over the line. By the time my brain caught up to what was happening on the ice and I heard the whistle, Horcoff was already across the line with his teammates, and everything looked normal.

I'm sure anyone who's watched a fair bit of hockey has experienced the same thing and knows what I mean. There are other instances, a quick turnover in the offensive zone and suddenly the opposing defenseman has the puck and he's just pounded it up the ice. But the puck's barely ten feet from his stick and you just know that he's not clearing it, somehow a forward has snuck behind your D, and though he's certainly not visible on the screen and the broadcasters haven't had time to even raise the excitement in their voices, you know he's about he's about to receive a breakaway pass. You haven't been tracking the opposition numbers in their zone, if the game were paused just as the defenseman grabs the puck, you wouldn't know that there are only four bad guys visible and the fifth is somewhere dangerous unless you actually thought about it and looked for it. But years and years of watching hockey (from the TV camera perspective) has told you that something's wrong here, and you get a bad feeling even though you don't quite know why yet.

After thinking about it, I was reminded of the book I just mentioned, and I realized that refs must have that ability on a much more detailed scale. That's how they see the subtle little infractions that happen a mile from the action, they don't know it, but something in their brain goes hey, high stick! even before the offended player has the chance to double over and grab his face to check for blood/missing teeth.

Now, if it wasn't so late and I actually had the book with me, I'd get into what Peter Gzowkski talked about in The Game of Our Lives with regards to elite athletes ability to "chunk" their environment into particular scenarios and instantly discern order from what would look like chaos to anyone else. It's sorta related to this topic, making instant decisions without actually knowing what you're seeing.
Actually, a brief google of the words "gretzky chunking gzowski" gives us an article by Gladwell himself which uses the example of Gretzky from that very book, so perhaps I'll just post a bit where Malcolm gives an excellent example chunking :

"A chess master, for example, can look at a game in progress for a few seconds and then perfectly reconstruct that same position on a blank chessboard. That's not because chess masters have great memories (they don't have the same knack when faced with a random arrangement of pieces) but because hours and hours of chess playing have enabled them to do what psychologists call 'chunking.' "

and the quote from The Game of Our Lives (which gives a much better description of chunking, including the chess example) :

"What Gretzky perceives on a hockey rink is, in a curious way, more simple than what a less accomplished player perceives. He sees not so much a set of moving players as a number of situations. . . . Moving in on the Montreal blueline, as he was able to recall while he watched a videotape of himself, he was aware of the position of all the other players on the ice. The pattern they formed was, to him, one fact, and he reacted to that fact. When he sends a pass to what to the rest of us appears an empty space on the ice, and when a teammate magically appears in that space to collect the puck, he has in reality simply summoned up from his bank account of knowledge the fact that in a particular situation, someone is likely to be in a particular spot, and if he is not there now he will be there presently."

In that five-hundreth of a second where Horcoff was over the blueline but the puck wasn't yet, my brain at least knew something was wrong, even if it had no idea what was wrong yet, and then on replay couldn't even tell exactly where the infraction was.