OT - Red Wings and Tomas Tatar Agree on 4 year, 5.3M AAV Contract
From WIIM, the Red Wings and Tomas Tatar have agreed on a contract. Tatar will earn $21.2M over 4 years.
I think this is a really good deal for the Red Wings. I think the $5.3M AAV is very fair and keeping the term to 4 years is a real postive. Glad to have Tatar long term. I have to give Holland props for this signing. Who knows if we would have gotten a good return from him had the arbitration process completed with a one-year deal.
If only they could do something with Franzen's salary and move Abdelkader and Zetterberg, they could clear a lot of cap space when it's time to renew Larkin, Mantha, and AA.
How dare you. They better never move Z. Never.
This team isn't going anywhere in the next couple of seasons. He'll be 37 in October and he's making $6mil the next four seasons. He can still help a contender, so I'd kick the tires to see if we could get any high level prospects for him. We need cap relief or else you can kiss AA, Mantha, Larkin and any other young players goodbye because we won't be able to afford them.
Red Wings are in Cap Hell, no doubt.
Franzen will be on LTIR until his deal expires in 2020.
Helm has a $3.8M AAV thru 2021.
Abdelkader has a $4.3M AAV for basically forever (2023!).
Glendenning AAV of $1.8M thru 2021.
DDK is making $5M per year.
Erickson is at $4.3M thru 2020.
Kronwall is at $4.8M thru 2019. He will probably end up on LTIR at some point with his knee.
$9.3M tied up in goalies.
None of those contracts are remotely tradeable so it will take 2-4 years before we can start to dig out this cap hole. At least Tatar's contract is a good first step.
Abdelkader, Ericsson, and DDK contracts make me ill.
They should seriously allow a medical exemption like they do for football scholarships. No reason to be stuck with Franzen and it harms both the players and teams when they have to worry about that before extending a longer contract the next time. He's clearly a special case and shouldn't be part of the cap anymore.
If there already is one then ignore my ignorance. I just thought not because you mentioned Franzen first.
The NHL does have an LTIR provision for players who will miss 10 games or more. I'm not an expert but I believe LTIR provides the team cap relief up to the amount of the player's salary if the team would have to go over the cap to find a replacement. This is the case with the Wings so they get relief from most (if not all) of Franzen's salary. I think the problem is that if they were ever to get below the cap then his salary would count against the cap limit.
now watch him score 18 goals next year, 11 after they've been eliminated from playoff contention
7 goals during training camp then?
Sadly, that would probably still lead the team.
Ken Holland is worse than Al Avila. The best GM in Detroit works for the Lions... let that sink in. Detroit sports are in trouble.
Now they need to turn their focus to signing Athanasiou (RFA). From what I understand, even with Franzen on LTIR, they only have about $1M of cap space left to sign AA, however he will command at least $1.5M AAV (if not more - up to $2M AAV). It gets even better, after signing AA, they will only have 22 players accounted for under the cap (full roster = 23) so Holland will have to do something to create enough cap room to bring up another forward from Grand Rapids. Somebody (Kronwall?) will probably have to start the year on LTIR unless there is a trade (and we all know that "trades are hard").
Fedorov and Lidstrom...
LET'S GO RED WINGS!