It was with great interest, and perhaps a great deal of incredulity, that I read the Columbus newspaper accounts on the weekend that implied departed Blue Jacket captain Adam Foote was something of a fraud and that he deviously orchestrated his exit from Columbus to Colorado by poor faith negotiating and threats of being a ''bad teammate.''
Interesting.
I would imagine most who have played alongside Foote in his illustrious NHL career would be hard-pressed to come up with ''fraud'' as a statement of his leadership qualities. Precisely the opposite, I would think.
But back to the original premise. According to the published reports in Columbus on Saturday and Sunday, which were also raised on Hockey Night in Canada on Saturday, Foote is purported to have set unrealistic contractual goals that he knew the Blue Jackets would never meet and by virtue of his no-trade clause, force a trade to only the Colorado Avalanche, indeed suggesting that he knew well before he was actually traded that he would need the services of a private jet to whisk him to Calgary that afternoon to hook up with the Avs that night.
Well, I suppose that is all possible. But not very plausible.
If I'm looking at this one objectively, it has all the earmarks of someone spinning the loss of the captain for the sake of $600,000 a year. I can't imagine it would be Columbus' general manager Scott Howson. For one thing, it's not his style. For another, no GM is going to pull that kind of stunt with his local media because it's hardly how an organization on the rise would go about attracting free agents to play in your town this summer.
While I have no issue per se with the Blue Jackets deciding to go in a different direction than a two-year extension for Foote, I can't imagine it's advisable to obliquely smear a stalwart NHL defender with a reputation for character and competitiveness on his way out of town.
So I can't imagine anyone in the Blue Jacket front office would do that, but someone somewhere is feeding the local Columbus media this stuff about Foote being a ''fraud'' or threatening to be a ''bad teammate'' or a ''bad captain.''
Foote is an interesting guy and if you don't know him and understand him, it could be difficult to make sense of all that went down in the days and hours leading up to the NHL trade deadline.
Above and beyond all else, Foote is very proud. He plays that way on the ice; he carries himself that way off the ice, too.
Foote has an ultra-defined sense of who he is, his self-worth and what he's all about and he's not really shy about it either. When teammates are not pulling their weight in his eyes, he let them knows and the message isn't subtle. He's an ornery cuss on the ice, a real hard guy to play against. And he can be a little rough around the edges off the ice, too, especially when he feels as though someone is challenging him.
Trust me, I know.
Leading up to the 2006 Olympics, I reported that Foote was on the bubble to make the Team Canada roster, that if he did secure a spot it would probably be as the seventh man, that his advancing age and the big ice in Europe would not guarantee his presence after being a core guy for Team Canada in Salt Lake in 2002.
Foote didn't like that report. Not a bit. He was sour. I believe he still is, which goes to the point of how he can take things as a personal affront.
It didn't matter that the information I was working with was coming directly from many of the decision makers for the 2006 Olympic team. In Foote's eyes, I might as well have dragged him and his family through the mud and kicked his dog in the arse, too.
Foote, of course, did make the Olympic team and to this day, you could never convince him he was anything but a dead-set certainty to be on that team.
Which brings us to the matter at hand.
Would he have stayed in Columbus if the Blue Jackets had met his price of $4 million a year on a two-year contract extension?
Absolutely, no question, in my mind.
I know this because up until the morning of the trade deadline, Foote's agent, Rick Curran, fully anticipated the Blue Jackets would come back with the $4 million a year extension and so did Foote. When the Jackets didn't ante up, Curran was shocked. Completely blindsided. He had assumed it wouldn't be a big issue and that his client would be re-signing in Columbus. Foote felt the same way.
Now, we can argue all day whether Foote is worth $4 million a year on a two-year deal. And the premise of the Columbus newspaper article was that Foote will have to settle for far less than that from Colorado or the open market if he should go there on July 1. I don't doubt he may be hard pressed to get $4 million or two years or both come July 1 but that is not evidence of anything other than how Foote's mind works. And it's not out of the question he gets one or both from some team.
This season in Columbus, Foote was making $4.6 million. He knew that in order to get an extension, he would have to take a haircut, that the Blue Jackets would expect him to take some sort of pay cut. And he was good with that.
But Foote looked around the league at what defencemen are signing for. He looked at the minutes he played for the Blue Jackets and the role he fulfilled on the team. And then he did what Adam Foote does best - he ascribed his own worth to the Blue Jackets at the sum of $4 million a year. And from that moment forward, he wasn't accepting a penny less.
It wasn't a financial issue. It was a worth issue. A pride issue. Foote has plenty of money. Plenty. But he has even more pride.
In his mind, he was fully prepared to take a $600,000 a year pay cut but that would be as far he would go. And he told his agent Curran that in no uncertain terms. And if there's anything Curran has figured out in his many years in the business, it's this: When Adam Foote tells you he's not accepting a penny less than $4 million from the Blue Jackets, there's not going to be any negotiating.
Curran told Columbus GM Scott Howson the same thing.
Still, the Blue Jackets came back with an offer of two years at $3.5 million per. Curran reiterated that it wasn't a negotiation, that $4 million was what it would take to get a deal done.
The Blue Jackets kept asking Foote and Curran if Adam really wanted to stay in Columbus. The answer was yes, at $4 million per year.
In fact, in their final conversation just before the trade to Colorado was made, Foote was asked again. He said, yes, you put the contract on the table for $4 million a year and I will sign it, right here, right now.
Simply, if the Blue Jackets had offered the $4 million times two, Foote would still be in Columbus right now. The Blue Jackets knew that. Foote knew that. That is the gospel.
But they didn't offer it. They wanted Foote to remain in Columbus without the extension, to ''talk about'' it later. Foote, as no nonsense a guy as they come, said either the Jackets want him at $4 million a year on a two year deal or they don't and nothing was going to happen in the ensuing weeks or months to change that.
The worst you can say about Foote is that once he realized he wasn't going to get his $4 million in Columbus that he played hardball to make sure he ended up in Colorado at the deadline because he may have feared, and rightfully so, that by July 1 the Avalanche may have gone in a different (Rob Blake) direction and he would have been shut out of the only other place besides Columbus that he was interested in going.
Nevertheless, the choice for the Blue Jackets was obvious: Either sign Foote to the extension or trade him to Colorado.
The Blue Jackets went with door No. 2 and took the first-round pick from the Avs.
And like I said, I have no real issue with that. Teams make hard financial decisions all the time. I would never begrudge Howson the right to do that here. If the Jackets don't want Foote at $4 million a year on a two-year deal, so be it.
Everyone moves on and they all live happily ever after.
But to pick up a newspaper or watch Hockey Night in Canada and read and hear an implication that Foote is a fraud who deviously orchestrated his own exit from Columbus, that he never had any intention of re-signing in Columbus, well, that is, at the very least, offside.
At worst, it's character assassination.
