Minor Ex-Leaf News

[cw]

I'm not clear on the performance bonus grievance. I think Marner got schedule A.
Matthews got Schedule B but who could foresee winning the lottery and the exceptional nature of that?
Many 4th overall picks did get schedule B
What of Schedule B would Marner have got?
The team was under cap pressure. $5 mil in performance bonuses in 2017 ...
I'm not clear on why that would be an enormous grievance for Marner.

I took a quick look at this
I might have missed something ...
Marner was 4th in league assists in 2018-19 which would have resulted in a $120,000 performance B bonus
Other than that, he didn't seem to get enough trophy votes, goals, pts, ppg etc to qualify for any other performance B bonuses over the 3 year entry deal.

I do not see that as a big grievance.
They gave him $65.4 mil on his next 6 year contract. It could have been $65.3 and they tacked on $100k to make up the performance B omission. It is a tiny 0.1% difference in the next contract.
When they said they were not going to give out performance B bonuses, they had no way of knowing they were going to win the lottery and get Matthews.
That claim smells like BS media posturing by Ferris to me.

 

[Bender]

That certainly fair, and I'm not saying the claims are baseless. But one side keeps bringing them up and treating these as cardinal sins that led to the player's decision to... play here for another full 6 years and stay for the entire duration because it was sooooo bad?

I think we can all see with actual on-ice, on-camera, written statements, and hiring decisions, that the Leafs did everything they could to support and optimize Marner in Toronto. I can't say they did it perfectly, but it's all on the table: hired vaunted sports therapists, top line minutes even when it stopped working, every special team assignment even when it stopped working, ludicrous second contract, put him front and centre on all the fun happy publicity and marketing, sheltered him from speaking to press after games, gave talking points to his teammates to extol his virtues, fired the GM that had a longstanding policy of not paying schedule Bs because he liked to put the team ahead of the individual (but made an organizational exception for a 1st overall pick), fired the coach that kept him apart from more points for the coach that tied him at the hip to a generational scoring centre, fired the GM that was hinting at trading him (or more likely Willy, who they've reportedly market-checked basically every offseason)...

And on the other side of the ledger, Ferris is essentially saying the Leafs tried to negotiate a lower salary and then tried to trade him when he clearly wasn't going to extend. Are these not standard operating procedures for any and all sports organizations?

I'm having trouble naming one player that was treated with softer velvet gloves by the Leafs than Marner, who could have very easily been the most beloved hometown draft pick ever (and was for that first 4 years since he was drafted).

Ferris also brought up the carjacking which has nothing to do with the Leafs or fans. It's grievance after grievance even where none exists - so much of what Ferris said is based on a very narrow view of events and not close to objective reality (Mitch being the ONLY one criticized for playoff performance for example).

To make things work in any relationship sometimes you have to bury the hatchet - if my fiancee and I had grievances at each other for every minor issue we'd be long broken up. I don't know how the Leafs and Marner could have ever worked out if the schedule B bonuses were forever held against them, even with 3 separate GMs.