The Vancouver Canucks blew some minds last Friday by signing defenseman Zeev Buium, who hasn’t even played a full NHL season yet, to an 8-year, $75.04 million contract, awarding Buium an average annual value salary of $9.38 million.
With the Red Wings having yet to sign restricted free agent Simon Edvinsson to a contract extension, the Wings may have to exceed Moritz Seider’s $8.5 million salary in order to ink Edvinsson to a long-term pact.
As such, Detroit Hockey Now’s Max Smith wonders aloud what the Wings’ strategy might involve:
For the Red Wings, Edvinsson now finds himself comfortably in a position to be asking for a higher AAV and potentially shorter contract terms. Buium has 76 career NHL games and 26 points split across his rookie season with the Wild and Canucks last year, which is roughly comparable to the 25 points in 72 games Edvinsson had last year in his sophomore season.
That was a downtick from his production as a rookie, though Edvinsson did have to spend time recovering from two separate injuries over the year. However, Edvinsson has shown himself to be much more capable as a defender than Buium has, with a +/- of +12 in each of the last two years, while Buium finished his rookie season as a -24 with the Canucks.
Any way you slice it, for the moment, Edvinsson has the edge on the stat sheet and should be able to leverage that to his full advantage with the Red Wings next GM.
If Steve Yzerman were still the GM, I’d argue that the team would hold fast to Seider’s contract value as an internal salary cap, but with a new GM/president of hockey operations coming in, all bets are off…
It’s a matter of when, not if the Red Wings decide to hand the big swede a new contract, and with no GM currently able to negotiate a new contract, the Red Wings are subject to the directions of the winds when it comes to the bargaining table.
Former GM Steve Yzerman was able to sign top defenseman Mo Seider to a seven year, 8.55 million dollar AAV extension a couple of years ago, and that now looks like a steal. Edvinsson isn’t quite the player that Seider is, but the 6-foot-6 Swede has more than proven that he’s worth keeping in Detroit.
Keeping Edvinsson happy also provides a lot of flexibility to the d-corps, either as a shutdown top pairing with Seider, or the leader of his own pair on the second line. After starting off his career with two 25+ point seasons, Edvinsson has earned his payday.
And the Hockey News’s Michael Whitaker notes something else: when the new CBA goes into effect on September 16th, teams will no longer be able to sign their own players to max-length contracts of 8 years.
Instead, teams will only be able to sign players whose rights they own to 7-year deals, and that presents some pressure for the Wings to both extend Edvinsson and consider what to do with Alex DeBrincat, who could become an unrestricted free agent next summer, and Marco Kasper, who’s a RFA next summer:
The Red Wings are now less than two weeks away from the start of Training Camp (Sept. 17). Last month, Edvinsson’s agent Peter Werner indicated via the Swedish publication Expressen that they’re in a holding pattern until Detroit’s management situation is resolved.
It was Expressen’s Gunnar Nordstrom who spoke with Werner, who stated,”We are patiently waiting for a new general manager.”
Meanwhile, signing DeBrincat to an extension likely won’t require much prodding from Detroit’s next general manager. DeBrincat, a Farmington Hills native, was the one who wanted to be traded to his hometown Red Wings.
The organization will be banking on the lure of helping his hometown team return to Stanley Cup contention, while continuing to raise his young family in Metro Detroit, to play a major role in a potential extension.
Currently, the Red Wings have approximately $19.57 million in available salary cap space. With the cap rising, the funds shouldn’t be hard to by.
That being said, the first order of business for Yzerman’s successor will likely be addressing the unresolved situation involving Dylan Larkin, who requested a trade shortly after last season ended and has reportedly not budged on that request despite Yzerman’s departure.
Detroit is facing far more questions than answers right now with Training Camp right around the corner, and it’s not an ideal position to be in – especially for a club that now owns the NHL’s longest active postseason drought.
As far as Larkin is concerned, it’s entirely possible that he’ll have to report to training camp two Thursdays from now, and whoever’s running the Red Wings come September 15th will have a very, very short window with which to re-sign Edvinsson and/or extend DeBrincat and/or Kasper.
