Quote:
Now, Babcock can’t simply ski and hunt his days away and watch the money pile up. The onus is on him to at least try to find employment.
“You can’t just sit back on the couch and collect,” Glasberg explains. But: “He could say, ‘I spoke to three general managers, and there are no openings, and I’m not going to accept a lesser job, so I’m going to accept a lateral or progressive job, and those jobs don’t come available very often.’ ”
When a head job does open up, a delicate negotiation begins. Say, purely for example, a team like Vancouver or Calgary comes knocking. If they low-ball Kyle Dubas and offer to pay Babcock $2.5 million, Dubas could hang up the phone or get the league involved. Glasberg has seen that happen before.
Glasberg says the next club to hire Babcock must pay “a market-representative salary,” and — even though his reputation has just taken a hit — Babcock’s closest comparables would be Claude Julien and Todd McLellan, each of whom earns about $5 million.
Some owners might insist the interested new employer take on all of the coach’s salary or nothing at all.
“It’s not the right approach, but sometimes emotions get in the way. I’ve had this happen where I’ve literally had to negotiate with both sides,” Glasberg says. “The challenge is, he’s very expensive. He’s at least a $4 million guy or a $4.5 million guy.”
That price tag alone eliminates a swath of teams, especially if they still have an outstanding tab on their current coach. (Not a problem for Seattle, but it doesn’t play games until 2021.)
“Most teams aren’t going to get in the way of a guy getting another job, unless they’re in the same conference,” Glasberg says. “Then it starts to get a little bit uglier.”
First of all, I'm not sure they're right when they say there's any onus on a coach who has been relieved of his duties to find work while under contract. I'm far from a contract lawer, but I don't believe that's the way pay-or-play contracts work. If Toronto does not want him to do the job they hired him to do anymore, then they have to pay him to stay home. It never comes up in real life because these guys are all sociopaths who aren't alive if they're not wearing tracksuits and yelling at people and they all find work before their contracts elapse, but how would Babcock be in breach of his contract if he
did just sit on the couch? They can't reassign him to scouting, middle management, or janitor duty without his consent and say he's insubordinating.
Even so, none of this sounds prohibitive to the Hawks. I'm sure they're paying Failed 2003 Draft Pick next to nothing to coach, and the giant contract the Panthers gave Quenneville should offset whatever was left on the books, so if they wanted Babcock, they could swing it. If McDonough did call the Leafs and offer to take half their Babcock money off the books and no one else offered something better, I doubt Shanahan or whichever one of Toronto's twelve vice-presidents is holding the phone that morning would run and cry to Gary Bettman about it. The Leafs were the ones who blew the lid off the head coaching market with that contract and fucked the whole bottom third of the league in the process; what pity do they get?
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Molly Lambert wrote:
The future holds the possibility to be great or terrible, and since it has not yet occurred it remains simultaneously both.
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