The Hardest Part of Free Agency Is Finding a Place to Belong

What happens when your NHL team says no? What is the hardest part of free agency? Those are questions that new Vancouver Canucks player Paul Cotter talked about during an interview with The Hockey News. His comments were interesting enough to revisit because they reveal something about free agency that fans don't always get to see.

Losing your job anywhere is tough, but in the NHL perhaps even tougher.

It’s tough to know what assumptions most fans have about free agency. July 1 looks like a player sitting down with a list of teams and choosing the best one. Cotter's comments blow that picture apart. You're an NHL player one day, and then your team decides it doesn't want to qualify you. You're not necessarily washed up. You may not even have done anything dramatically wrong. The organization simply decides that your contract, role or projected value doesn't fit.

Then comes the strange psychological part. Cotter had to ask himself whether another team would actually be a better place, whether he'd get more opportunity, whether he would fit the organization and whether leaving one place for another would help his career. That's where the phrase “leap of blind faith” becomes the heart of the story. Every player making that decision is betting on something they can't know yet.

That’s where it comes back to Vancouver.

The Canucks didn't just offer Cotter $2.15 million. They offered him something perhaps more important: the sense that he was wanted. That is a fascinating part of roster building that doesn't show up in CapFriendly or a stat sheet. A player who has just been told, in effect, we don't need you, suddenly hears another organization saying, we think you can matter here.

This season’s story for Cotter isn’t really about whether he can score 15 or 25 points. It's about what happens to an NHL player's sense of value when the organization that employed him decides his value isn't high enough—and what it means when another organization takes the opposite view.