#blah blah vegas always blah blah vegas should've blah blah- NO

[flaticeball]

let’s talk about good faith: why the dadonov trade-that-wasn’t mess is not vegas’s fault, no matter what all the tweets say

okay. hello! i don’t know if anyone’s going to read this but i need to put my feelings somewhere and i like explaining things. for some personal context: i am not a lawyer. what i am however is partway through law school, in possession of a previous legal degree, and some work experience in the field. i want to be clear about where i’m speaking from. i am also a fan of the vegas golden knights. i’m a fan of a lot of teams, and vegas is not what i’d call my top team, but i do like them quite a bit, and i want to be transparent about that. however, this is not me speaking as a vgk fan. this is me speaking as a legal professional in training, and somebody who’s done a lot of research over the last year on contracts, sports and entertainment law, and business law.

this post includes, because it got too long NOT to put under a cut for the sake of anyone who follows me: summary of current facts, review of the obligations and policies at play, and an explanation of why the vegas golden knights bear nearly or absolutely no culpability for this cluster. special thanks and credit to @himbeaux-on-ice, as we’ve talked about a lot of this stuff over the last few days, which helped clarify what i’m saying here, and who made some of the mentioned points to me initially. 

first, for a brief summary of the facts as we currently know them to be:

evgenii dadonov has, as part of his contract, a modified no-trade clause, consisting of an up to 10 team list he cannot be traded to. while this was initially the focus of some debate, is has now been proven that he or someone representing him filed his m-ntc list correctly and on time this season, in compliance with the terms of his contract.

these lists are filed with the team and not with the league or with any central official database.

dadonov was traded from the ottawa senators to the vegas golden knights in july 2021.

while not much has been officially verified on this front, it is currently reported by elliotte friedman that on the phone call confirming the trade between ottawa and vegas, both the golden knights and the league itself were led to believe that dadonov’s no-trade clause was void. i do not believe and i am not claiming the senators front office in any way did this deliberately and maliciously. it is my personal view, based on the most likely scenario, that this was a massive mistake on their part that is - all love to the senators players and fans, you have a lovely team - characteristic of the sort of competence people who pay attention to hockey have come to expect from pierre dorion and company. fwiw, the senators and the league have both declined to comment at this point on this allegation. 

on monday, the 21st of march, the 2021/2022 nhl trade deadline, the vegas golden knights and the anaheim ducks agreed to a deal that, among other things, would send dadonov and his cap hit - which is crucial for vegas right now as they approach playoffs with several key roster pieces on LTIR - to the ducks.

the trade was eventually officially announced and it seemed for a minute that was that. then, as questions were being asked about dadonov having a m-ntc by people who either remembered this from the senators, looked it up on capfriendly, or otherwise were somehow aware, it all got real confusing real fast.

over the last two days there has been a lot of back and forth as more and more of the details above were discussed and reported on and confirmed to varying degrees of certainty, and the ultimate resolution is now that the trade has been voided and dadonov will remain on the vgk roster. 

now we’re gonna talk about who had the obligation to do what here and what expectations existed of those involved.

foremost obviously the most aggrieved party here is evgenii dadonov. he fulfilled his obligations to file his list on time and correctly. he has done his job. his rights need to be protected. the result here, where the trade has been voided, is - let me be ABSOLUTELY clear - the only possible correct solution to this situation. his obligation was to file his list. he fulfilled it. end of story.

now, regarding that phone call between ottawa and vegas. i have seen a LOT of people say, with varying degrees of ‘being an asshole about it’ that vegas should have, or was obligated to somehow verify or back up the information presented to them on that call by the senators. “why didn’t they do their due diligence!” “why didn’t they follow up on that!” “why didn’t they talk to dadonov about it!” “why didn’t they check capfriendly, it was clearly posted THERE that he had one!”

here’s where the concept of good faith comes into it. there’s an absolutely crucial concept in all of law and the legal world but especially contracting and business called “good faith,” which basically means “you’re trying to get the best outcome for you and im trying to get the best outcome for me but we are not trying to screw each other and we’re doing it with our cards on the table.” if vegas were told by the senators there was no valid clause in play, they would not only reasonably believe it, to look into it farther without any actual evidence it was faulty information would imply they believed the senators were negotiating in bad faith.

at a base level, an nhl team acting in good faith and expecting other teams to also be acting in good faith, would expect the other party in a trade to be: 1. competent, 2. telling the truth, 3. providing the full contract of the player at question. at no point would it make sense, from either a practical and logical or an inter-team relations standpoint, for a team to investigate the terms reported by another team on an official three-way phone call with the national hockey league laying out the specifics of the contract involved in a trade deal.

the ‘due diligence’ of the vegas golden knights in this situation was to participate in that phone call the way they do every other trade phone call. it was to receive the necessary information from the senators and consider that information when dealing with their player’s contract. they were not the ones dadonov negotiated that contract with, so neither they nor the player himself had any reason to go over the details of it together. they inherited the contract with him, it was not their contract. also, when the trade came up, according to their records it would then have shown he had no moving issues, as per the call with ottawa. they had no reason to verify this with dadonov. dadonov, conversely, had every reason to expect that his contract had been correctly transferred with his list correctly noted, and so there would have been no reason for him or his agent to contact the front office about it.

as to why they didn’t check capfriendly, i don’t know how to explain this in a way that doesn’t sound condescending but. capfriendly is an unaffiliated, external website run by stats and roster building nerds. it’s a wonderful, amazing, unbelievably cool and reliable resource but at the end of the day: if i am an nhl team, on the phone with another nhl team on an official trade record call with the league, and they tell me something is true, not only am i not going to follow up on it without indication i need to, i am also not going to take capfriendly’s word over theirs.

in short: this is not vegas’s fault. they had no obligation to assume another nhl team was misrepresenting a contract in an official trade call, and it would’ve been bad business if they did assume that. they were definitely not knowingly disregarding his no-trade list, that would be stupid and they’d know they’d be caught immediately. would love if everyone would think for 5 minutes past ‘gold team bad >:(’

[caliversatile]

CALI-BLOG!

Blog title: "Introducing Me, CAYLIE VEGA!"

Written in: July 29, 2020

Edited: April 10, 2020

Hi fam! So this is yours truly, Caylie Vega aka Caliversustheworld. And yes I'm a foreign invader from outerspace who's quite obsessed with writing, daydreaming, reading, making cartoons/arts, binge-watching animes, and listening to music especially rock. I used plenty of pseudonyms before settling down to my new name (Caylie Vega aka CVTW), due to some "personal" reasons of course.

Moving on from that part, I started becoming a writer since I was like 9 years old. I am a certified bookworm and I wanted to write the idea that just popped out of my head, so my first story was like written in a stolen piece of yellow paper from my parent's room, and it was a tale about a certain magical angel mermaid whatsoever. Let's just say that she was a product of both Angel and mermaid blah bla blah. That story was followed by another children's masterpiece which was entitled, "BEA THE BEE" and had some cute illustrations in every page. And just as when I fin'lly reach my last year in Elementary (writing for academic purposes since 4th grade isn't counted) I wrote another fairytale story again, and this time was about a statue princess. Innocent as it may be seen, those pre-writer works are all just made out of unutterable boredom, no aspirations involved. What truly moved me to dream of becoming a published author someday is when I discovered about the glorious existence of electronic books. Teenfiction e-books are totally different from the usual non-fiction/academic books I used to read during my boring childhood. The context is awfully written and there's so many loopholes and grammatical errors like adding some unnecessary things like emojis or exaggerated sound effects like, "BOOOOOOGGGSHSHSH!" "SPPPLUUURTRT!" "SKADOOOSHHHHH!!!!". I also noticed that the authors are prefer informal character point of views instead of using the omniscient perspective. However, It's not like I'm criticizing those minor flaws but I rather find it amusing in a way that I like how funky and deviant it is from the standard — it's like eating ice cream in a new flavor. In simpler terms, I fell in love with e-books like how should girls my age fell in love with their first love.

And because of that stimulus, I began to aspire writing novels — solely for fun and curiosity. However, if you think that I've already published a lot of works already because I started from that age, well that's a big mistake. In fact, I haven't. I do but can't even finish one due to my "writer's block" syndrome. Having this as a condition is one of my greatest challenges in this endeavor. It makes me frustrated enough to doubt myself, if whether I was born to become a writer or nah. Year by year, I always come up with a lot of good story ideas (a whole village of 'em) but none of them are finished or even written in the first place, 'cause it's either I keep them hidden in the darkest part of my mind or I always ends up stopping after losing all the enthusiasm in the middle of writing it. I know, that feeling is horrible. I also wanna smack myself but what else can I do anyway? I'm emotionally vulnerable, I easily get inspired and fired up like how I easily get tired and depressed at the same time. Whenever I get the chance to read other people's works, I always tend to feel frustrated with my own when I shouldn't be comparing my chapter 1 to other people's chapter 50. Guess I should've known better.

I kept on asking why God seems like preventing me to do it, until 2020 happened to me. Amidst this life-changing global pandemic, I have learned a lot of things not just from my own self-realizations but also from the online communities I recently joined in. I finally understood that making novels isn't meant for me during my younger years because it's waiting for my growth as a writer now. Before, I thought writing is just a hobby, but now it feels like a permanent career opportunity that I would love to do even when I grew old. I used to think that novels are just written for fun, now I am seeing it in a better, professional perspective. I wanna be a writer whose works give positive impact to my readers. I wanna be a writer whose works are written beautifully like how great painters do their crafts. I wanna be a writer whose works passed the ethical and moral standards of my target demographics and also to our community. (but If I'd still crossed some borderlines, I'd always put a warning about reader's discretion)

So, I decided to break the barricades and write a story for real starting this year — without stopping halfway anymore. I also tried to assess what could possibly be my mistakes from the past (of why I'm feeling the WB syndrome) so I can make a new strategy that I can use against it. From an innocent-writer-wannabe, I finally graduated as a plotter novelist. Yes, I plot my stories now before drafting them. I'm also setting a writing schedule daily so I won't miss the deadline I pinned for myself.

Anyways, thank you so much for reading aliens! Watch out for my next update while stay safe from COVID19. Keep invading and get crazy romantic! 🌷