While it's a popular notion to parrot that players in the NHL are highly-paid professionals and therefore less susceptible to the potentially dangerous mixture of an ill-fitting locker room personality than most people, that's simply not the case.
Hockey, maybe more so than any of the other four major sports, relies on the relationships in the locker room, on the belief players have in one another and the camaraderie that can help push a good roster to a great one during the season's most important moments.
Thus fans of the Calgary Flames and Boston Bruins, searching desperately for a reason why up-and-coming stud defenseman Dougie Hamilton was available at a price that seemed well below market value, may need to look no further than what was a reportedly prickly and self-important character on behalf of Hamilton.
"It was surprising," said one NHL assistant GM, via Stephen Harris of the Boston Herald. "It's obvious there's something going on that we don't know about. From what I've heard behind the scenes, his teammates don't like him. I heard he's a loner and sort of an uppity kid, and that his teammates don't like him and it was unanimous."
Hamilton, of course, was shipped to the Flames by new Bruins GM Don Sweeney just ahead of the first-round of the 2015 NHL Draft for picks No. 15, 45 and 52. It was a universally panned deal - though we here at HNGN feel as though any and all judgment on such a trade should be reserved for at least a couple of seasons - and it's not hard to see why.
In three seasons for the Bruins, Hamilton appeared in 178 NHL games and amassed 22 goals, 61 assists and career plus-23 rating. At just 22, Hamilton appeared to be rounding into form as a potentially elite offensive-defenseman.
Getting only several picks, even fairly high ones, for a player of his caliber and still significant potential was hard to understand, even considering his contract status and the Bruins difficult cap situation.
Then again, when you see reports of his alleged asking price, it starts to make a little more sense.
"The best information I can give you is it appears the team offered six years and $33M to Hamilton, while the response was about $2M per year higher," writes Elliotte Friedman of Sportsnet.
In the end, it was likely Hamilton's contract demands and the tough cap spot former Bruins GM Peter Chiarelli put Sweeney in that resulted in Hamilton's being dealt as much as anything - for what it's worth, another Bruins source indicated to Harris that the team didn't want to lose him - but it certainly can't be good news for fans of the Flames to hear that they just brought in a potential problem child and, further, are probably about to lock said potential problem child up with a new long-term deal in the not-too-distant future that could wind up carrying an AAV in the range of $7 million per season.
