Red Wings GM Steve Yzerman’s most polarizing signing this month is a simple answer: the signing of 31-year-old Ben Chiarot.
The big defenseman signed a 4-year, $19 million contract (with an average aggregate value of $4.75 million per season), and the contract includes a modified no-trade clause (per CapFriendly) over the course of the deal.
That’s a lot of money to be paying a defenseman on the Tylenol-taking side of 30. We’ll see how Chiarot performs as he accumulates hard miles on his odometer, but the history for big, tough defensemen in terms of an aging curve isn’t spectacular, so more than a few eyebrows were raised at the money and term that Yzerman gave the 6’3, 234-pound Chiarot.
This morning, The Athletic’s Dom Luszczyszyn ranks the Chiarot contract as the 10th-worst contract in the NHL today:
10. Ben Chiarot
Contract: $4.8M x four years
Surplus Value: -$16.2M
Positive Value Probability: 11.7 percent
Ben Chiarot is 31 years old. He plays a very rugged and punishing game. He is signed until he’s 35 for nearly $5 million per season. His best comps are Jack Johnson, Roman Polak, Dion Phaneuf, Brent Seabrook, Mark Stuart, Dan Girardi and a slew of other similarly-branded defencemen. Of his 25 best comps, over half were out of the league after two years.
This is not a good contract in any sense of the imagination.
Is it bad enough to be on this list? It depends on how you calculate surplus value. The chart above shows a negative $16.2 million, but that imagines a low-end cutoff of the league minimum. As you can see on the left side of the chart, Chiarot’s market value — according to the model — falls well below that. The actual retail price is negative $23.7 million.
But. That’s based on the model’s judgement of value. As has been often reported, Chiarot’s real value lies somewhere above that… and somewhere below what traditional hockey folks believe. That mid-point is a third-pairing defender, and $4.8 million is already a steep price for that. Add in his age, the term, and the comps that all scream limited utility and Chiarot is a player who belongs here. He can be worth it if traditional scouts are right about his game, or if he thrives in a more suitable role. For now, however, it’s a bit hard to see.
Continued; even Steve Yzerman makes mistakes from time to time (the Brendan Perlini for defensive prospect Alec Regula trade worked out spectacularly well for Chicago, who’s gotten a solid middle-pair defender in Regula)…
But it’s just too early for me to predict nothing but gloom and doom for the Red Wings because one defenseman’s been over-paid.
As they say, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
