Yes, welcome to the silly season. Where rumors will fly abundantly and team sources won’t say anything that’s real for the most part because they are doing their own form of manipulation to get the player signed for less or the biggest return on the mmarket..

When a rumor is out there this time of year, I don’t blame people for jumping on the bandwagon and writing about it because there’s not a whole lot going on with the Flyers right now that’s at least something to write about. But I’ve been playing this game long enough to know what happens this time of year for the most part. And how these kind of rumors get started.

I got several texts from people yesterday saying, “What’s wrong with Danny? Why wouldn’t he trade Foerster for Rossi? Who cares about late first-round picks?”

Let me start by saying there’s nothing wrong with Danny Briere. And as far as eye can tell, he’s not the “team source” spreading these rumors at all.

Teams are going to ask about Foerster, especially after working with Crosby in the World Championships. He’s also got a hell of a pair of hands and probably the closest thing the Flyers have to a snipper, who isn’t Russian….

And teams are also calling Billy Guerin in Minnesota about Rossi.

Both players are our RFAs, so why would their names be out there?

As I wrote today in my blog above, remember the word motivation…

First, it’s important to know that these kinds of rumors usually come from people in the organization, rarely the GM. Not that the GM doesn’t know about the rumors and isn’t OK with it being out there ….The GM allows this game to be played by the underlings for the most part. And a lot of reporters use the underlings as their main sources. We all do. But you need to remember the difference as to where you get a source from.

So why would the Flyers be OK with Foerster‘s name being out there?

#1. If they want to keep the player.
He’s an RFA, and they don’t have acontact with him yet. Players generally want to stay where they are, so if they hear the rumors of them possibly being traded, they may go to their agent and say, “ I would really prefer to stay here,” and suddenly the agent is OK with taking a little bit less on the new deal.

#2. If they want to trade the player.
The team wants to set the price high. So by saying that they won’t accept something, even if that something wasn’t actually offered by anybody, but was made up by the team itself, they wanted it out there . That way, the league and other GMs start to think that this player might be better than they realized. If the Flyers are putting such a high price on him. Maybe I should get involved and make a deal for him.

And as you can clearly see both of those two reasons work together very well… and they all work towards the inevitable goal of either getting the most they can from him or paying the least they can for him…. It’s just hockey business and everybody does it so no one looks at this like it’s crazy or malicious…..

Nd what happened as a result… something that happens more times than I can count the rumors are followed by assigning as the flyers have inked Tyson Foerster to a multi your deal… for a bit less than they were expecting

All that being said, let’s talk about this…
What do you think is a fair return for Tyson?
What would you be willing to pay to keep him here?

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