Robyn Regehr may have played his final games for the Los Angeles Kings, but thanks to the Calgary front office, he retired a Flame. How does a GM decide who’s worthy of the one-day send-off deal? Here’s the breakdown.
Identify a worthy player
At its essence, a ceremonial retirement deal rights the record and fixes what seems to be a less-than-fitting end to a career. Do you really want to see Jerry Rice retire as a Seahawk? (In case you forgot, he caught the last 25 passes of his career with Seattle.) No, he had to leave the game as a 49er, especially after he signed but didn’t play with the Broncos. Rice and San Francisco needed to leave things in a good place.
Understand that it’s not a matter of numbers
You don’t get a retirement contract based on hitting a statistical benchmark—not even 500 goals (sorry, Pat Verbeek). “It’s one of those things that you know when you see it,” Flames executive Craig Conroy says. “Robyn Regehr was second all-time in games played with the Flames, but I first thought of a retirement deal for him when he was playing in L.A.—the Kings honoured him one night for playing his 1,000th game. When they brought out his grandmother, Olga, she was wearing a Calgary Flames sweater. I’m glad that Robyn got his name on the Cup with the Kings, but he’s still a Flame.”
Don’t trick it up too much
“I didn’t want anything like Mike Modano’s [retirement] contract with the Stars,” Regehr said, when asked about term and dollar value. Infamously, Modano’s deal with Dallas (after a lone season in Detroit) called for him to be paid $999,999.99, a tribute to the number he wore all those years. No, it wasn’t paid out and it didn’t count against the cap but still, it read too much like a sale price. Calgary could have offered Regehr $826, a dollar for every game with the club, but, as Conroy says, “Robyn has never been a guy who really looked for the spotlight. Just not his type of thing.”
This story originally appeared as part of the How-To package in the March issue of Sportsnet magazine.
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