It wasn’t so much a veiled shot as it was an open one, as Martin Brodeur voiced his displeasure with Devils management and how they handled the situation that ended in former captain Zach Parise jetting out of New Jersey for his home-state Minnesota Wild.
Parise signed a 13-year, $98 million deal with the Wild on July 4, 2012, and Thursday night’s game at the Prudential Center will be the first on his old stomping grounds as an opposing player.
“It affected our organization in a big way, losing him, and that’s what the fans care about,” Brodeur said before a game in which Cory Schneider was to start in net for the Devils, who were five points out of a playoff spot with 13 games remaining. “Us, we know it’s part of the business. We had plenty of chances. We had two years to talk to him and try to figure out something. We waited and waited, and it was too late.”
When directly asked whether he thought it was a mistake for management to wait as long as they did to make Parise a contract offer, Brodeur didn’t hesitate.
“For sure,” Brodeur said. “When you know you have an athlete that is going to be a game-breaker, that is going to be one of the top players, rules are that free agency comes a lot younger than it used to. You have to make commitments. You look around the league, some of the young guys, the [Lightning’s Steven] Stamkos, etc., they don’t wait, they get them done.”
It has long been the policy of general manager Lou Lamiorello not to negotiate with players during the season, and because of that, he has seen many big-time players leave as free agents. When Parise was made aware of what Brodeur said, he rejected the idea that Lamoriello’s tardiness to the negotiating table had any effect on his departure.
“Lou has his policies and his way of doing things,” Parise said. “It’s not as if Lou waited until June 29 or 30 to pick up the phone. We had talked before that, we had talked the summer before that. I don’t think it’s fair to say that Lou waited until the last minute, because that wasn’t the case.”
Brodeur went so far as to reference the Devils’ tenuous ownership situation two years ago, when Jeff Vanderbeek was financially handcuffed with debt. This past August, the team was bought by the owners of the NBA’s Philadelphia 76ers, Josh Harris and David Blitzer, yet by then Parise was out the door.
“We let him walk to free agency,” Brodeur said. “That’s a decision [of] the organization, regardless if it was financial at the time with the ownership that we had. But he was our property for a long time and we lost him.”
The Devils went out to Minnesota to face Parise and his new team on Nov. 3, but the Wild hadn’t been to New Jersey until now because of last season’s truncated schedule that eliminated inter-conference play due to the owners’ lockout. The last time the 29-year-old Parise was in the building was for Game 5 of the 2012 Stanley Cup finals, when the Devils beat the Kings, 2-1, only to lose the next game in Los Angeles and watch as they raised the Cup.
“He grew in this organization, he captained a team that went all the way to the Stanley Cup finals, and that’s a lot,” Brodeur said. “There are not many captains in the league that could say they do that. Even though he didn’t win, he led us there and that’s pretty impressive.”
Parise said he tried to recruit defenseman and fellow Minnesotan Ryan Suter to New Jersey that offseason, to the organization that had drafted him 17th overall in 2003. Instead, with Suter’s reluctance to leave the Western Conference after playing for years in Nashville, the two chose to sign identical contracts in their home state.
Brodeur spoke to Parise on the day he signed, and knew the decision was only between his childhood home and his professional one. With rumblings of a possible departure for the rival Rangers — though Parise said he would never sign with them — Brodeur knew it could have been a lot more painful for the fans.
“A lot of people have influence on players, agents and families and stuff like that,” Brodeur said. “And if he went anywhere else — I don’t have to name the team — it would have been a lot heartbroken for the fans instead of going to Minnesota, that’s for sure.”