Silloin kun jäältä ei liiemmin raportoitavaa ole, niin onneksi toimistolta löytyy aina jotain. Moderniin henkilöjohtamiseen erikoistunut toimitusjohtaja Bergevin kertoo
Athleticissa (maksumuuri), miten Alznerin posketon sopimus oli suunnilleen Alznerin itsensä vika.
Lainaus artikkelista:
"Then last year, Bergevin landed his desired target, Karl Alzner, and signed him to a five-year, $23.125 million contract. Alzner has yet to crack the lineup this season.
Bergevin is not exactly proud of the contract, but he’s not willing to write Alzner off, either. Right now, cap space is not a problem, and if it becomes a problem in the future Bergevin said the fact Alzner’s salary goes down over the final two years of his contract makes a buyout more feasible, though it is far more punitive for the Canadiens to do it with two years left on the deal than if they only bought out the final one.
“But the way the cap is going, the way our team is going, I don’t believe that contract is going to hurt us to the point I’m going to have to sacrifice a young kid,” Bergevin said.
Still, a lesson was learned there, one Bergevin was readily willing to admit.
“You have to look at the player’s environment,” he said. “First of all, when that happened you have to understand what we were thinking. There was an expansion draft. We already lost Emelin, I traded Beaulieu, so my expectation was Karl was probably a guy that could eat 20 minutes. I knew he would never run numbers; he was going to play a good, solid game, move the puck quickly, block shots, be reliable. But he didn’t do that. He came in with the old mentality of the Washington man on man and he couldn’t get off that, so it was always create a battle, create a battle. He was in an environment in Washington where he was protected … he was a decent defenceman there.
“What happened here, the system changed, maybe I gave him a contract where … but I know there were other teams talking to him. Maybe six months from now we’re having a different conversation where he gives us 20 minutes a night and he gets the job done. I hope that’s going to happen, I think he might get it done, but that’s up to him.”
Bergevin said that if there were no expansion draft, he probably never would have signed Alzner, which means he was essentially signed to replace Alexei Emelin. While it appeared as though the Vegas Golden Knights did the Canadiens a favour by taking the final year of Emelin’s contract off their hands, it instead created a situation where Bergevin felt the need to go shopping on the UFA market for a replacement"