Trade to Dallas bittersweet for Richards
Brad Richards wants to make this perfectly clear: He doesn't blame Tampa Bay general manager Jay Feaster for trading him, though he was upset to leave the only NHL organization he's ever known.
And Richards insists that’s not a knock on his new team, the Dallas Stars, who picked him up in the biggest trade of the deadline day. In fact, he is feeling pretty good about being on a Stanley Cup contender again, especially after making a sensational debut Thursday with five assists.
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| Brad Richards feels Tampa Bay let something special fritter away. (AP) |
"I think if the manager was able to maybe give it a run a little bit more for a couple years with the internal budget being higher, they probably could have kept things afloat a lot better," Richards said in a conference call Friday. "Then maybe if it didn't work, do what they're doing now.
"But instead, the budget was cut early and often, and they were handcuffed in a lot of ways. Many times the last two years we played with the exact number of guys, no extras. If a guy got hurt you wouldn't even call someone up some games; you'd play one short."
Such was the life in Tampa Bay since the team won the Stanley Cup in 2004 and Richards took home the Conn Smythe as playoff MVP. The lockout ensued and didn’t help matters because it prevented the organization from fully capitalizing on the good will in its own non-traditional market, and when the work stoppage ended with a salary cap imposed on all teams, the Lightning found themselves scrambling to hang on to their best players.
Tampa Bay ended up tying up nearly half its budgeted $44 million payroll to Richards, Vincent Lecavalier, Martin St. Louis and Dan Boyle, which created major holes at several other positions, most notably in goal. To many, it was a case of classic mismanagement in the post-lockout era by Feaster, but Richards argued it was always an issue driven by ownership, which mandated financial constraints and it got worse after the team was put up for sale last summer.
"I'm sure (Feaster) would like to have some things over again, every GM would, but every team is paying their top guys now and most of those teams get to go to the cap," said Richards, who signed a five-year, $39 million contract in 2006 which made him the league’s highest paid player at the time.
"We weren't and it's pretty sad to see how things have gone when they were headed towards building so much stability. It's pretty tough to watch."
And it may not be getting any better in the near future. The sale process is still ongoing, but it has been complicated and has run into new roadblocks lately. According to a report in Toronto’s Globe and Mail, potential purchaser Oren Koules, a Hollywood producer, is having difficulty arranging financing because scandal-plagued French bank Société Générale pulled the plug on a loan agreement to him.
That put even more pressure on Feaster to re-jig the salary structure on a floundering team, and the key step was moving Richards to free up $7.8 million in annual cap space for the next few seasons. The trade allowed Tampa Bay to re-sign Boyle this week and to start working on an extension for Lecavalier, but it couldn’t have happened had Richards not given up his no-trade clause.
"Things were getting stale for me in Tampa," Richards said. "Obviously they’re in a rebuilding stage so I told Jay (GM Feaster) that if ownership wants to do this, we weren’t going to hold them hostage.
"But Jay told me right from the start that if this is going to happen and we're going to do anything, we're going to do what's best for you. That was comforting and made things a lot easier."
