Thursday, January 12, 2017

How Much Are The Flyers Going To Have To Pay Their Young Guys?

This afternoon, I saw a link to a post by a British Flyers fan about how the Flyers' 2018 offseason is going to look. It's an intriguing read, and the nuts and bolts of it is we are going to possibly maybe be screwed when Wayne Simmonds, Ivan Provorov, and Travis Konecny all need new contracts.

Simmonds, of course, is going to be worth significantly more than his current $3.975 million. We'll let that go for now, because even over the past year and a half his value has increased immensely. He now kills penalties, which means he's one of the few Flyers that plays in all situations (and unlike Sean Couturier, Simmonds stuffs the scoresheet in two of those three situations).

We're going to focus on those two youngsters - Provorov and Konecny - plus a third. That would be Shayne Gostisbehere, who is going to be due a big payday after this season.

Or is he? Are any of them going to really be due a "big payday"? Isn't that why NHL teams negotiated for restricted free agency? The whole point is so they can pay peanuts to young players who haven't "earned it" yet, right?

Let's dive in.

Ghost was a finalist for the Calder Memorial Trophy last season. Provorov probably will not be a finalist for this year's award, though he'll likely be in the conversation. Konecny probably won't be in the conversation, but he is an offense-first player and that tends to lead to heftier contracts than defense-first players (like, say, Couturier).

Since I am bad at the internet and can't find a list of all the Calder finalists since the 2004-05 lockout, I'm going to have to just use the list of winners. That list breaks down into three groups, at least for our purposes:

Forwards

  • Alex Ovechkin (2006)
  • Evgeni Malkin (2007)
  • Patrick Kane (2008)
  • Jeff Skinner (2011
  • Gabriel Landeskog (2012)
  • Jonathan Huberdeau (2013)
  • Nathan MacKinnon (2014)
  • Artemi Panarin (2016)

Defensemen

  • Tyler Myers (2010)
  • Aaron Ekblad (2015)

Other

  • Steve Mason (2009)
That'll give us a place to start for forwards, though it will be probably more money than Konecny gets because most of those Rookies Of The Year are superstars. But it would be nice to get some additional defensemen, so I'll include rookie blueliners that finished in the top seven in Calder voting during their eligible years. That feels like a fair bar for Provorov. 

Defensemen:
  • Dion Phaneuf (3rd, 2006)
  • Andrej Meszaros (7th, 2006)
  • Marc-Edouard Vlasic (6th, 2007)
  • Matt Carle (7th, 2007)
  • Toby Enstrom (6th, 2008)
  • Drew Doughty (5th, 2009)
  • Tyler Myers (1st, 2010)
  • John Carlson (5th, 2011)
  • PK Subban (6th, 2011)
  • Jake Gardiner (6th, 2012)
  • Justin Faulk (7th, 2012)
  • Jonas Brodin (4th, 2013)
  • Justin Schultz (7th, 2013)
  • Torey Krug (4th, 2014)
  • Olli Maatta (5th, 2014)
  • Jacob Trouba (6th, 2014)
  • Hampus Lindholm (7th, 2014)
  • Aaron Ekblad (1st, 2015)
  • John Klingberg (5th, 2015)
That's much better. So, to recap: we are going to be able to use some high-end comparables for rookies who have had success in the past decade to try to gauge how much money Travis Konecny is going to command. We're going to do the same thing for defensemen to get a ballpark for Shayne Gostisbehere and Ivan Provorov. 

Look for the actual figures com

No comments:

Post a Comment