Hockey

As he'd hoped, Dany Heatley mostly slunk under the radar this past week during the Canadian men's Olympic orientation camp. His decision to speak out the previous Friday about his NHL future had the desired effect. Most everybody with a microphone or a notebook left Heatley alone to concentrate on other issues relating to the Olympic team.

At the heart of Heatley's desire to leave the Ottawa Senators in search of greener NHL pastures is an interesting philosophical conundrum, one that periodically crops up in the world of pro sports. In general, the trade-off that a highly paid, elite athlete tacitly agrees to goes largely unquestioned in the larger world. He receives vast sums of money - in Heatley's case, $45-million over a six-year period - and in exchange, accepts a curious 21st-century version of indentured servitude.

This sort of working relationship between employer and employee is the bedrock of professional sport, both here and abroad, and is nominally designed to preserve a competitive balance in their respective leagues.
Increasingly, over time, and as their financial rewards soared, some athletes began to chafe against these working conditions - and asked that they be amended with the inclusion of no-trade and no-movement clauses within their contracts. In a nutshell, they wanted more control over their day-to-day lives.

In the NHL, when the last collective bargaining was completed following the 2004-05 lockout, that was one of the few significant concessions earned by the players. The age for unrestricted free agency dropped by six years, meaning players, at a much earlier stage in their respective working lives, gained a bigger say in their career paths.

The expectation - that everyone would shuffle around, changing teams in search of the biggest pay day - proved to be illusory. Some did, of course. Others were content to stay with their teams, taking less and willing to do so for stability off the ice, and eliminating (mostly) the fear of uprooting families without warning.

More than 100 of the 750 or so players in the NHL have negotiated that sort of contractual protection.

All of which brings us, in a roundabout way, back to Heatley's saga. In the midst of the Senators' year-and-a-half slide into mediocrity, Heatley decided he was no longer happy working for a boss, coach Cory Clouston, who demanded different things from him than he was ready to provide.

Heatley talked about a "diminished" role, which upon harder scrutiny wasn't so much a reduction in his ice time, as it was in his power-play presence. The best way to keep scoring 50 goals annually is to play about 70 seconds on the first power-play unit, every single time it goes on the ice. That didn't always happen under Clouston, a youngish coach, who took the bold and sometimes risky step of holding all of his players accountable, even the ones with the fat bank balances.

You've seen it happen elsewhere in the past, this battle of wills between coaches and players. Scotty Bowman challenged Steve Yzerman to change his style - to sacrifice personal stats for the greater good of the team. Ken Hitchcock did the same with Mike Modano in Dallas.

These sorts of demands generally require a great deal of soul-searching on the part of the affected players. First, they need to know exactly what is being asked, and then they need to figure out how to respond. Yzerman and Modano both chose the same path. They didn't run from the challenge, they embraced it and eventually concluded that over the span of a distinguished NHL career, the most satisfying moments come from contributing to a team's success.

Yesterday, the San Jose Sharks - the team linked most closely to Heatley in trade talks - shed salary, by trading away two defencemen, Christian Ehrhoff and Brad Lukowich, to the Vancouver Canucks. Even general manager Doug Wilson acknowledged that a primary motivation was to "create some flexibility in our team payroll for potential future transactions as the season progresses."

So maybe the Heatley talks will begin anew.

For now, the consensus around the NHL is that the only reason Heatley hasn't been traded yet is because no one is prepared to give the Senators full value in return. When the dollar commitment to a player is so staggering, any GM making that sort of deal puts himself squarely on the firing line.

He needs to be absolutely convinced he can make it work. Otherwise, if it blows up in his face, it is the sort of gaffe that can send a GM to the unemployment lines in a hurry. And so, these managers protect themselves by offering a discounted value - and if the deal doesn't go through, there is no harm in trying.

On Thursday night, during Canada's intra-squad game at the Pengrowth Saddledome, Heatley made his first public appearance since his trade demand and was roundly booed whenever he touched the puck - or until he scored a goal in the shootout. That had to be a sobering moment for him - to get that sort of reaction in his hometown, where you'd think the fans would be happy that he didn't end up in Edmonton.

And if that experience has an effect on Heatley, then who knows? Maybe it will act as an awakening for a 28-year-old young man who, up to now, skated away clean through all the trials and tribulations of his life thus far - presumably leaving him with the feeling of being bulletproof, invulnerable.
Maybe Dany Heatley's next NHL employers will get a new, more grown-up version of the player - someone who finally gets that isn't all about him. It's happened before and if it happens again here, some team may do very well for itself.

It's just a question of who, if beyond the Sharks and Edmonton Oilers, may be prepared to take on that calculated risk.