Tuesday, August 29, 2017

Man, I Love The Eric Lindros Trade Fiasco

The deep dive into the fabled Lindros Trade (which has its own Wikipedia page) was wonderfully done by NHL.com in 2012, and then was republished last season when Lindros was inducted into the Hockey Hall Of Fame. It came to mind for me this week, with the news that the Flyers are going to retire his #88 into the rafters forever. 

Part three of that four-part NHL piece focuses on the complex legal situation that was a disputed trade between the Quebec, Pennsylvania, and New York franchises of an Ontario-based league. As seems to be the case in most legal battles, each organization found supporting precedents to support the ruling that would have most benefited their individual interests. 

But first, let's set the scene:

Eric Lindros was perhaps the most heralded junior-hockey player in history -- at just 18 years old, he was 6-foot-4 and 225 pounds. With a blend of dominant skill and overwhelming size and strength, many had pegged him as the next great NHL superstar, following closely in the footsteps of Wayne Gretzky and Mario Lemieux.

Taken by the Quebec Nordiques with the first pick of the 1991 NHL Draft, Lindros resisted signing with the club. He spent the 1991-92 season playing junior hockey and skating for Canada at the 1992 World Junior Championship and the 1992 Olympics. Lindros reiterated to the Nordiques that he would play outside the NHL in 1992-93 and re-enter the draft in 1993.

Faced with the possibility of losing Lindros with no compensation, the Nordiques began entertaining offers for Lindros' rights, with the culmination of that effort set for the 1992 NHL Draft in Montreal.


June 20, 1992 marked one of the stranger days in NHL history: Just prior to the start of the draft, the Nordiques twice traded Lindros' rights -- first to the Philadelphia Flyers then to the New York Rangers.

As a Flyers fan, I tend to sympathize more with the Philadelphia contingent in the story. Here's the front office's description of the day of the 1992 NHL Draft, which is the day they (thought they) completed the trade for Lindros, and then found out that Montreal yanked the rug out from under them:

Russ Farwell, Philadelphia Flyers general manager

"We thought we made the trade. We called Eric and I got in a cab and went to the draft."
"Jay called me and said, 'Aubut is backing out, he tried to trade him somewhere else,' and that's where it was. He said, 'I'm not going over [to the draft], I'm taking a car to ...,' he was going to file a grievance. In the meantime, we pulled our guys together. We thought we had traded our pick so we pulled our guys together and said we had to pick."

Jay Snider, Philadelphia Flyers president
"I was just pretty much in shock. I didn't know how to react. This was crazy. I called my dad [Flyers owner Ed Snider] and I said, 'You're not going to believe this -- Marcel said, I traded him to the Rangers.' Just like that, happy as could be, typical Marcel Aubut. … Our first reaction was, 'You know what? Screw it, this deal is too much and to hell with it at this point, let's just let it go.' And then I don't know if it was that conversation or he called back five minutes later, but he said, 'Before we do that, go talk to Gil Stein,' League's general counsel, 'and find out what our rights are.' I went to the draft floor, sought out Gil, explained our situation, Gil said, 'Let's get John [Ziegler, NHL president].' We go into a back room, talk about the situation and he said, 'Jay, you can arbitrate this.' I said, 'OK I'm arbitrating this -- what do I do?'"

Jim Gregory, NHL vice president of hockey operations

"[Ziegler and Stein] asked me a couple questions, but nothing serious. I just told them that Larry Bertuzzi, who was doing work for the NHL, was an unbelievable lawyer, had a perception about hockey, and would be a good man. They listened."

..And so it began. Bertuzzi was to arbitrate the matter, in Montreal because the entire league was already there for the draft. Lindros was poised to be a generational talent, a player that Philadelphia and New York would both love to add to their organization for the next two decades. Montreal was going to receive a haul either way, but their 'individual interest' (as I worded it) was to bring back as much talent and assets as possible. 

Jay Snider, Philadelphia Flyers president

"It was very hostile up there, because in essence Lindros was snubbing French Canada -- I couldn't find a law firm in Quebec to work for me. Not one. I went to probably five top firms and they all refused to take it."

"[Nordiques owner Marcel] Aubut brought in a major firm, and the head of the firm had been the ambassador to the United Nations, a member of the Royal Order of Canada.

"[Chicago Blackhawks owner] Bill Wirtz lent us his attorney [Gene Gozdecki], who was there as an alternate governor for the Board of Governors meeting. He started the first day representing us in the first hearing."


This is my second-favorite part of this whole story. Lindros had refused to play in Quebec, and EVERY LAW FIRM IN QUEBEC refused to represent anything that remotely involved his interests. It's like how a small Texas town treats its football players, but it was the second-largest province in Canada with something like 8 million residents. It was something like the entire state of Virginia, and not a single big-time lawyer would support any party not named the Quebec Nordiques. 

And the guy who ended up representing the Nordiques was a UN Ambassador and had received 'The highest degree of merit, for an outstanding level of talent and service or an exceptional contribution to Canada and humanity.' Picture Charlie Kelly going toe-to-toe with Harvey Specter on any legal topic other than bird law. 

Let's jump to Larry Bertuzzi (uncle of Todd), who was a Toronto lawyer with quite a bit of NHL experience.

Larry Bertuzzi, arbitrator

"I show up in Montreal on Sunday morning, I'm introduced to all the parties. I make a few inquiries -- tell me everything that's on the books on how to deal with this matter. Tell me everything that's on the books about what makes a trade, how this dispute is to be resolved. Give me all the guidelines that are already in place. They handed me a two-line piece of paper. And it said -- I'll paraphrase it -- when there's a dispute involving whether or not a trade took place, the dispute shall be handled by the president of the League or at the consent of the parties by an arbitrator. Period. Full stop. That was it."

(Quick spoiler: whether or not the three teams consented, the NHL was always going to endorse him as arbitrator. So that little two-line piece of paper ended up meaning that he was totally FUCKED for the next week or so.)

"There are three parties, there's about 12 lawyers and I look around and we have people representing legal jurisdictions of Ontario and Quebec in Canada, New York, Philadelphia and Illinois in the States. And I realize that there is absolutely no legal procedure which governs the proceedings. So I effectively put the challenge to the counsel and, 'I need you to tell me what the question is you want me to answer and how you're framing it and I want to see if the three parties can come up with a process by which we might get to the bottom of this.'

"I get a call about 5 o'clock [Sunday] from Snider and Weinberg and I go down there and they said, 'We're going home.' I said, 'What? You're going home?' They said, 'Look at this piece of garbage that they gave us.' Sure enough Quebec and New York had written a very one-sided-looking document and Philly said, 'We're not taking this.'

"I had breakfast with the NHL [Monday morning] and I said if they don't agree to me as arbitrator consensually, what are you going to do? Ziegler said, 'I'm going to appoint you so it's out of their hands.' I said, 'Fine, that's all the jurisdictional backing I need.' I went in at 9 o'clock and I said, 'Gentlemen I've given you six, seven, eight, nine hours to come up with a process. You failed miserably. Here's what we're going to do. We're going to adjourn for two hours and I'm going to write out the process myself. And I'm going to then hand it out to you and you have two choices: You can like it and we'll proceed or you can hate it and we'll proceed nonetheless.'"

Jay Snider, Philadelphia Flyers president

"Bertuzzi said this is going to be kind of based on common sense and law and the NHL rules. It's based on an amalgam of law. Because in Quebec the law is a little different than the rest of Canada. It's like Louisiana in the U.S. -- it's more based on a French system. There's nuance. He just said it's not going to be based on one jurisdiction of law; it's going to be based on common sense in a way."

This is the single most interesting thing for me about this whole ordeal. Bertuzzi essentially had to invent a legal code for handling this situation that factored in two separate Canadian provinces (with vastly different heritages) and three separate US states. 

It must have been a complete pain in the ass to create, but this was a one-time set of guidelines that will probably quite literally never apply to any situation ever again for the rest of time. It's tough to find anything about Bertuzzi on the internet that isn't about this case or his relationship to Todd, but I would be willing to be that this was a highlight-of-the-career type of opportunity.

Larry Bertuzzi, arbitrator

"The hearing went for five or six days: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. It finished at about 6 a.m. Saturday morning.

"I was making it up as I went along. And I had no one to consult. And it was highly secretive and it was both the most challenging thing I ever did and one of the loneliest legal things I ever did. I had an attaché from the League who became a good friend, Benny Eroclani. I had a security guy from the League who I spent all my off hours with. I wasn't lonely in that sense -- I had people to eat with. But from a pure running-the-case perspective, there was a room full of lawyers and a room full of executives and there was little old me at the front. I was in charge of making all the rules, but I was on my own."

"During those six days we had nothing but bumps and bruises along the way. We had objections and I'd say, 'What's your objection?' and they'd say, 'That's not the way we do it in Pennsylvania.' Someone else would say, 'That's not the way we do it in New York,' and someone else would say, 'That's the way we do it in Quebec, that's the way we do it in Illinois.' Back and forth, stuff like that.

"We had a request to subpoena the Lindroses, except I had no subpoena power. I had to get on the phone with the Lindros' lawyer and negotiate their attendance. So when they showed up they had their own lawyer. We had to navigate the press every day. We had a press blackout, but since the NHL's annual meeting was on, maybe 20 of the press stayed all week and hung outside the room.

What a fucking MESS this must have been.

Jay Snider, Philadelphia Flyers president

"It was horrendous. It was one of the most stressful periods in my life."
Yup.

Jay Snider, Philadelphia Flyers president

"I remember on the last day, before final arguments, Phil [Weinberg]said, 'I need to be alone.' Phil had to figure out basic law and he came up with the basic principle that the existence of a contract is from offer to counteroffer to acceptance. If you look at the decision, it came down to the fact that Aubut's call to me and giving me permission to talk to Lindros was the indication that a contract had been reached. At the very basis of it all, that's an accepted principle in law in all jurisdictions. It indicated that a valid agreement had been reached."

Phil Weinberg, Philadelphia Flyers lawyer

"What I was trying to argue was that's what makes a contract. In the simplest terms a contract is formed when there's an offer and it's accepted. Acceptance can occur in a number of ways. It can occur in writing, it can occur through action -- in any way that the parties manifest that they have accepted the offer. That's sort of hornbook law about what makes a contract. There's a little bit of discrepancy in the law of the United States and the law of Canada as to how can that acceptance be manifested. In the United States, it has to be ... there's an objective theory of contract formation and a subjective theory of contract formation. The objective theory is, what would the outside person looking at things determine as to whether there had been an acceptance of an offer. And a subjective theory isn't so much what an outside observer would think, it's more what you think in your own mind, the accepting party, as to whether you've accepted the terms of the offer or not. The European common law that runs through Canadian jurisprudence a little bit more is this subjective theory. And the American theory is the objective theory.

"What I was able to argue is that by all outward manifestations, Marcel Aubut, who was the person accepting our offer, indicated his consent, indicated his acceptance, because there was this term ... one of the things that happened in the arbitration was that we had wanted to talk to Lindros to see if he'd sign with us. And Aubut had said somewhere along the way that if he gave us the number then we had a deal. He did in fact give Jay the number at some point for Lindros so that we could talk to him and see if he would play in Philly. We used that fact.

"What I was able to do was argue that Aubut in the Canadian way of thinking about contract formation, probably in his own mind, didn't even really know he had made a contract because it was more subjective to his own way of thinking. He, in his own head, was playing out this auction but holding back in his mind the ultimate assent to the offer, the ultimate agreement or acceptance. But that doesn't matter because the rule of law that should be applied is the objective theory. Any outsider, any third party, anybody looking at his conduct, would believe a contract would be formed because we can't go into the mind of somebody to really understand what they're thinking. Which is why we ascribe to this objective theory. Once he met the last term of our offer, which was, give us Lindros' number to see if he wants to play in Philly, then he had accepted all of the terms by an objective theory. It didn't really matter what he was thinking about anything. I think that's what I was really trying to stress."


Phil Weinberg has been General Counsel for the Comcast/Spectacor company since it was created in 1996. Knowing what we know about Ed Snider and the Comcast-Flyers family in general, I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that his brilliant handling of the Lindros situation earned him that position for life. 

Larry Bertuzzi, arbitrator

"I phoned the NHL on Monday and told them I had my decision ready to go because I worked all day Sunday on it. They said, 'We don't want you to release it now; we want you to release it on national TV.' So we had this major extravaganza where at 9 o'clock I had a conference call involving all the clubs and read my decision. And then at 10 o'clock, on a conference call with more than 100 participants, I read the decision on national TV, on TSN and on the radio. And then we had this monster press conference."

"The case turned on the following: If New York and Quebec agree they made a deal on the basis of the conduct they engaged in, then applying that same test to the Quebec-Philly discussions, they must have made a deal an hour earlier."

As it turned out, the question that Bertuzzi had in mind with his 'I need you to tell me what the question is you want me to answer' quote was just simply 'Did the Nordiques trade Lindros to the Flyers?'

And, as it turned out, the answer was yes. Maybe Marcel Aubut honestly didn't realize what was happening. Maybe he was being a snake and trying to fuck over the Flyers. Maybe the legal mindsets that have developed over hundreds of years based on French, British, and American principles are just fundamentally different and shit like this happens. 

Whichever way you want to look at it, it's one of the (if not the singular) most entertaining sports law stories of recent history. 

And there's a great happy ending quote from Farwell:

Russ Farwell, Philadelphia Flyers general manager
"I remember our staff a week or two after saying we announced that signing, we sold more season tickets than they did after they won the Stanley Cup."

Tuesday, August 15, 2017

My Top 25 Under 25 Chart

As Broad Street Hockey's Top 25 Under 25 countdown rolls on - today's entry is Robert Hagg - the conversation seems to focus more on the debate between future potential and immediate impact.

Take Hagg, for example: he'll likely play in the NHL this season, but his upside is decidedly lower than Philippe Myers (who is more of a longshot to make the big club this year). Myers will finish higher in the rankings, as he has not appeared in the countdown yet, but there is something to be said for the fact that Hagg is already NHL-ready.

In my initial Top 25 Under 25 list, I generally favored NHL-readiness over long-term potential. I think the best representation of this fact was my placement of Mike Vecchione and Taylor Leier above first-round picks German Rubtsov and Morgan Frost. The latter pair will almost certainly leave the former pair in the dust if they reach their potential, but Vecchione and Leier will likely contribute (at least sparingly) this season.

So, because I have all the time in the world to kill, I'm going to try to reconcile my less-than-concrete logic and place everyone together in a two-dimensional chart.

Basic Framework

I'm going to rank each side of the chart on a scale of 1-5. Here is how I intend those to work (but I haven't started ranking yet, so this is all subject to change).

2017-18 Contributions

  • 5 - Cornerstone player for the Flyers
  • 4 - Will make the team and play the entire season in the NHL
  • 3 - Not a lock to make the team, but probably will spend the year with the Flyers
  • 2 - Probably will only see time as an injury fill-in
  • 1 - I'll be shocked if he plays a game in the NHL
Future Potential
  • 5 - Perennial All-Star
  • 4 - Key contributor at the NHL level for a decade
  • 3 - Solid contributor for a long time
  • 2 - Journeyman
  • 1 - Might have a few good seasons
  • 0 - Zac Rinaldo
And, with that in mind, let's rank some guys. 


There is a lot of grouping, because I am just one person and my general thought process was something along the lines of "there are going to be a lot of guys who are either in juniors or on the Phantoms this season."

It's a little easier to compare when I add in diagonal gridlines:


Here's how that translates into my revised Top 25 Under 25:
  1. Ivan Provorov
  2. Sean Couturier
  3. Shayne Gostisbehere
  4. Nolan Patrick
  5. Travis Konecny
  6. Oskar Lindblom
  7. Travis Sanheim
  8. Sam Morin
  9. Robert Hagg
  10. Philippe Myers
  11. Scott Laughton
  12. Carter Hart
  13. Felix Sandstrom
  14. Taylor Leier
  15. Mike Vecchione
  16. Wade Allison
  17. Isaac Ratcliffe
  18. German Rubtsov
  19. Nicolas Aube-Kubel
  20. Anthony Stolarz
  21. Pascal Laberge
  22. Mikhail Vorobyov
  23. Morgan Frost
  24. Matt Strome
  25. Alex Lyon
And my honorable mentions would be Mark Friedman, Radel Fazleev, and Connor Bunnaman.