Sportsnet: Elliotte Friedman on the Jeff Marek Show on whether the NHLPA can file a grievance with the NHL for the Chicago Blackhawks terminating Corey Perry‘s contract.
** NHLRumors.com transcription
Marek: “The NHL Players Association and the Corey Perry grievance. Like I can understand this from the PAs point of view. Not wanting a precedent set based on what happened with Corey Perry and what the, what the discipline was.
So I do understand that even if the player says ‘I don’t want to file a grievance,’ this one is about future players and other situations for the Players Association, unless, to your point, they create a specific carve out for this one situation.”
Friedman: “Yeah, you know, Jeff, one of the things that I have written about and I’ve talked about it with you, is that I remember in Patrick Berglund’s case especially, and that was in 2018. When Buffalo terminated his contract, the Players Association wanted to fight it and Berglund refused. He’s like, ‘No, I’m not doing it’ and, and the, and he was done. And so the Players Association was like, ‘okay.’
And they, but they were mad about it. And it wasn’t just one person who told me they were mad about it, it was several people. But they were like, it’s a player’s not going to do it, we can’t do anything about it.
Now, so I’ve generally had that opinion when it comes to this. And I think Nick wrote this today in his column too. Like, there’s generally a feeling like you cannot let this one stand. And even if the player says no, and we don’t know what Perry’s doing, at least I don’t know what Barry’s doing. Even if the player says no, I’ve been told that there is a big conversation behind the scenes of we cannot allow that to pass.
And the reason is, look, I’m not trying to minimize anything. I don’t know. I think I have a pretty good idea of what happened here, but I don’t know exactly. And it’s, it’s crazy to guess when you don’t have all the details. But in terms of grounds to terminate it, it’s not as, it doesn’t go as far as some of the other reasons.
And the agents and the players and the Players Association, they don’t want this, this specific violation to be saying, okay, we can terminate a deal.
Now, as you said, there have been carve-outs before. There was, I can’t remember which one it is and I’m looking for, I’m gonna ask someone, but there was one specific, I think it was a discipline situation where there was a carve-out. Where the two sides reached a deal, and they said there aren’t going to be any, this can’t be used as precedent anywhere else. And that has happened in the past, but the two sides have to agree to it.
