How can a team bend over when a player under contract demands trade?

I never understood this....if a player signs a contract, wasn't he suppose to fulfill that contract? How can the team management bend over for player requests to trade? I never understood part of the n't it up to to the team to decide when to trade.

If only sports was fair, like the rest of life is.

Quote: winningwizard

I never understood this....if a player signs a contract, wasn't he suppose to fulfill that contract? How can the team management bend over for player requests to trade? I never understood part of the n't it up to to the team to decide when to trade.

As long as player is honoring contract while requesting trade its up to the team to decide if they need to honor that request. If player refuses to play that's another story.

There is very little value to a club in having a superstar athlete who is unhappy and who doesn't want to play for the club. You will get below-par athletic production, constant negative publicity and locker-room dissension. All while paying the player a fortune.

The obvious answer is because they manage the team poorly. But true examples of these are pretty rare. In the NFL only ones I can think of are John Elway and Eli Manning coming into the league. Colts either shouldn't have drafted Elway, or should have been willing to lose him to baseball for nothing. Chargers ended up getting more than full value for Manning. Doesn't really ever happen in MLB, mostly because of the way the collective bargaining is structured; no team is going to move an underpaid young player, an overpaid older player is just going to collect their paychecks, and losing players to free-agency means compensatory draft-picks, so their is far less urgency to get something rather than nothing.

NBA seems to be fairly common for players to demand trades, but rare for teams to bend over and take less than full value for them. Some examples I remember: Dwight Howard kept going back and forth between wanting to stay in Orlando and wanting out. The Magic screwed themselves by sticking with such a weirdo. Kyrie Irving was just the Cavs panicking and being foolish giving him away for virtually nothing. Spurs did fine with Kawhi Leonard, they were willing to not trade him, but ended up with four years of an All-Star instead of one year with an MVP candidate. Anthony Davis didn't demand a trade so much as let the team know he was gone; Pelicans ended up ok with the trade, would have been better if Kouzma was included, but whatever. Jimmy Butler is just a headcase and neither Chicago, nor Minnesota would be better off if he wasn't traded. Don't know the behind the scenes stuff with Paul George, but his first trade from Indiana was simply him not wanting to re-sign, so just a matter of get something instead of nothing. The trade from OKC was mostly a matter of the Clippers making an offer too good to pass up.

*I asked google for some other examples. Any Marlins player in recent years has wanted out. But the team has been more than willing to give up anyone they would have to pay. Kobe Bryant demanded out of LA after they were swept out of the first round with no help. They didn't give in to his demands and won a couple more titles