With the expiration of the NHL/NHLPA Collective Bargaining agreement and a lockout looming at the end of next week, a huge piece of the Dallas Stars future remains unresolved: getting restricted free agent center Jamie Benn signed to a new contract.
The trend around the NHL has been for teams to lock up young standouts into long-term deals that preemptively provide substantial raises in the hopes that the player's continued development will make the deal a bargain during what would be his latter RFA eligibility period or sometimes even into his unrestricted free agent eligibility.
According to a recent
article by Sports Illustrated writer Allan Muir, the Stars hope to get Benn signed to a intermediate (two-year or three-year) extension similar to what the team gave Loui Eriksson in 2008-09.
There is a major and fairly recent NHL precedent for such contracts: whenever the 2012-13 season starts, Philadelphia Flyers forward Claude Giroux will enter the second season of a three-year contract extension he signed ahead of the expiration of his entry level contract and first year of restricted free agent eligibility.
Giroux's deal took him from an $821,666 cap hit ($765,000 actual salary in its final season) to a $3,75 million cap hit (with progressive real-dollar salary escalation from $2.75 million last season to $5 million in 2013-14). He will have one season of RFA eligibility remaining upon its expiration and then could become an unrestricted free agent in 2015. The forward is eligible for an extension next summer; it will likely be Philadelphia's No. 1 offseason priority as the 2013 offseason moves along.
However, Giroux's deal quickly became obsolete. Leaguewide, NHL teams (including Philadelphia) have moved to sign current/potential 2014 RFAs to long-term extensions of five or six years. The deals have come in under the wire of the next CBA potentially limiting the maximum length of contracts to five years. Most recently, Edmonton signed Taylor Hall and Jordan Eberle to respective seven-year and six-year extensions that will carry $6 million cap hits.
The chances of Benn agreeing to a Giroux type of contract appear slim to none. It is likely to take a five or more year contract with a salary bump from his current $821,667 cap hit to something in the neighborhood of the $5 million range -- and that is being conservative because Benn is already an RFA rather than a player entering the final year of an entry-level contract.
On the surface, the Stars would have leverage over Benn in a new CBA. There WILL be contract-length limits of some sort (whether it's five years or longer remains to be seen) and the cap will be rolled back to some degree.
However, I agree with Muir that Benn is still the one with the real leverage here. As an RFA, he can hold out until he gets a satisfactory deal. As the Stars' top line center and one of their two most important players (along with linemate Eriksson), Benn is going to get a big raise, anyway. It would ultimately cost the Stars LESS to do it sooner rather than later, especially because they are much closer to the cap floor than the cap ceiling.
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Coming tomorrow, I will assemble a directory of Stars prospects and links to their teams' 2012-13 season schedules. I did a similar blog today for Philadelphia.
I am pleased to announce that I will be writing an extensive Stars-related article for Sweden's Pro Hockey Magazine. The piece will run in the Nov. 15 issue and will also appear in the corresponding Finnish and Czech versions of the magazine. Huge thanks to editor Linus Hugosson for the unique opportunity.
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