The Calgary Flames Have a Crappy Understanding of the NHL’s Crappy Rules

Jay Feaster, Calgary Flames GM, havin' a giggle.

It’s always a fun race to the bottom when one ponders the question: “Which Canadian NHL franchise is the biggest joke?” This is pertinent, because this week a new team pulled very clearly ahead. Yep, big congratulations are in order to the good folks in Edmonton - you guys are off the hook!

This past week, the big news in Canadian hockey was that Flames General Manager Jay Feaster signed 22 year-old two-way centreman Ryan O’Reilly to an offer-sheet worth ten million dollars over two years. O'Reilly was a restricted free-agent, which differs from a run of the mill unrestricted free-agent in that they can’t sell their services on the open market. Instead they can only sign an offer-sheet. With offer sheets and restricted free agency, the rules are designed to allow teams to hold on to the talented young players they draft. It's part and parcel of the NHL's most basic ethos: rewarding failure, something the league is the best at of any professional sports league in North America. So O'Reilly had two choices he could dance with the team that brought him for below market value, or he could solicit the best offer from the other pretty girls at the dance. Of course in that case the team that brought him would get the first right of refusal and if they declined to match the deal they'd be compensated with draft picks.

In theory, signing O’Reilly to an offer sheet is a sensible move: he's good, young and worth the risk. But the stupidest ideas are often those that strike one as defensible at first. Kind of like tequila shots when you're already fucked up.

Where the O’Reilly signing transitions from being a “gutsy move” and enters the realm of the indefensibly silly is in the details. The NHL was recently locked out for a bit more than a hundred days (you may have heard?) and hockey didn’t resume until the two sides agreed on a new collective bargaining agreement (CBA). But the two sides are still hammering out the details of that new CBA and are operating under the rules laid out by a “Memorandum of Understanding” (MOU) that is basically a caterpillar which will one day become a pretty, complicated CBA butterfly.

Let's not get too bogged down in the details, all you need to take out of this is that the rules are pretty vague at the moment and one might be forgiven for missing a detail or two. That is, unless that person is named Jay Feaster, a man who is paid millions of dollars annually to run an NHL team and understand the byzantine regulations of the league.

Ryan O'Reilly havin' a chew.

Because he couldn’t come to terms with the Avalanche, Ryan O’Reilly held out to begin the season and even played in a couple of games after January 19th with a KHL team (the KHL is the Russian hockey league) called Metalurg Magnitogorsk. As such, he was subject to an oft-forgotten, monopolistic rule (rule 13.23 under the old CBA) that applies to players who play “outside North America after the start of the NHL regular season.”

So had the Avalanche (the team that owned the rights to O’Reilly) decided not to match the Flames’ offer-sheet, then Ryan O’Reilly would’ve had to “clear waivers” in order to join the Flames. Here’s how waivers work: if a player is placed on them, then every team in the league gets a chance to claim that player (starting in order of priority from the club with the worst to the best record so far in the regular season). Because O’Reilly is young and really good, there’s zero chance he would’ve made it through this process without being taken by a team, i.e. he would never have “cleared waivers.” It’s likely that twenty or more teams would have sported huge boners for O’Reilly and put in a claim. So Calgary would’ve paid through the nose in draft picks for the right to pay O'Reilly 2.5 million. They would have then promptly lost his services for nothing on waivers. Hoo boy what a clusterfuck that would’ve been. In Feaster’s defense, no one involved in the saga appears to have been wise to this crucial detail. Ryan O’Reilly’s agent didn’t know and it’s pretty clear that Colorado Avalanche General Manager Greg Sherman didn’t know either. There's malfeasance on all sides here, but Feaster fucked up the most. He's since claimed that the Flames “had a different interpretation of the rule” than the NHL did, but that explanation is weaker than the third act of a Christopher Nolan film.

The whole pointless, damaging exercise is symptomatic of the short-sighted (dare I say desperate?) paradigm in which the Flames organization has operated over the past half decade. Everything has revolved around “extending” the window to win for a mediocre core, that is so stupid it hurts. Sure the Flames made the Cup Finals one year because Jarome Iginla is awesome, Kipprusoff got hot, and journeyman Martin Gelinas morphed into Claude Lemieux; but the Flames are built around a middling foundation that doesn’t include some pretty key components like “a first line centreman.” If the Flames organization were an investor, they'd have spent the past decade throwing all their money into Blockbuster Video.

So at least the Flames achieved something this week, beyond just “averting disaster when Colorado matched their offer to O’Reilly.” As it turns out, thanks to this mess the Calgary Flames are no longer just a sad-sack franchise resigned to tread water in a sea of eternal mediocrity and hopelessness. Now they’ve finally amounted to something more: a fleshed out punchline.

Just for the record and to be crystal sparkling clear here, the Flames aren’t one of those amusing punchlines that you find in dad humour. It’s not like “why do Dolphins volunteer at soup kitchens? Because it gives them a sense of porpoise.” Nope, that’s not the Flames. Calgary's franchise is more like a shocking, dark, existential punchline. One that leaves you feeling used and depressed, maybe even unclean after the fact, like, “How does a live baby escape a trash-can filled with dead babies? It eats its way out.” Ladies and gentlemen, your 2013 Calgary Flames.

Follow Thomas on Twitter: @ThomasDrance

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