Renters’ Insurance: Why the NHL Should Crack Down on “Rentals” and What They Need To Do
Trade deadline day has come and gone and Mats Sundin remains a Leaf, much to the disappointment of many Leafs fans who seem to forget all he’s done for the team. The real problem that needs to be examined though isn’t Sundin’s refusal to leave, but the entire concept of a rental player and why the league needs to put some countermeasures in place to make “rentals” a thing of the past.
First let’s define a rental. In a rental situation, the idea is that a player going into unrestricted free agency from team X is traded away at the deadline to team Y. Then, in the summer, the player re-signs with team X. In essence, team X gets something for nothing.
There are multiple problems with this. First of all, it could technically be done multiple times. Mats Sundin for instance has voiced that he is only interested in one year contracts. That means that in theory, had he been willing to be a rental, the Leafs could have rented him out over and over again, each time gaining without loss, until they were in a position to make a good playoff run. The real problem however is that in rental situations, it is very likely that the team acquiring the rental could essentially be getting cheated. If a team tells a player about to go UFA that he’s being traded as a rental, but he’s “welcome back next year, wink wink, nudge nudge”, then that is tampering. A rental situation in which a player is traded only to return to the team that traded him reeks of tampering and unfortunately there is really no way to prove it with hard evidence.
The Leafs were in a rental situation themselves with Glen Wesley. He came to the Leafs, played a bit and then went straight back to Carolina. Now thankfully, the Leafs didn’t give up anything really significant to obtain Wesley, one second round draft pick (still too much). But imagine if that had have been a more significant deal and the Leafs had’ve given up some significant assets to get Wesley, only to have him leave. There would be some outrage and rightfully so.
What needs to be done is that the NHL has to mandate that any deal involving a trade of a player going into unrestricted free agency has a mandatory clause that invokes a penalty if that player re-signs with the team that traded them. What the penalty is could be negotiable between the two teams making the deal, but the clause itself would be required. That way a team making a trade, and giving up good value for a player about to be a UFA could do so with the certainty that they would have as fair a chance as any other team of re-signing the player. If the player does go back to his former team, so be it, but the penalty will send some of the initial trade value back to the team losing out. This sort of clause has been included in “rentals” in the past, and exercised, but it should not be optional. For the good of fair play, it should be required.
If something like this was put in place, it would still allow for players to be moved going into UFA off-seasons, the key is it would make it fair. A team picking up a guy like Mats Sundin would not have to worry that they were picking up a player that had already agreed with a handshake that he would return to his old club. Tampering would essentially be eliminated, because any tampering that saw a rental player return to his team would result in the team losing part of the value of the trade.
Sending a player away with the understanding that they’ll be right back is a dirty move. The NHL needs to step in and put some controls down to make sure teams don’t get screwed in deals with dirty back ends.
Stumble it!
