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Much of NHL's free-agent frenzy was spending for spending's sake |
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After a truly shocking afternoon of blockbuster trades on Wednesday, the NHL’s first day of unrestricted free agency had a lot to try and live up to as sheer entertainment entity less than 48 hours later. That it more or less did so is a credit to player agents and an indictment of certain franchises clearly desperate to improve at just about any cost.
Certainly, there were player signings that over the years will prove to be of good value to the teams that committed to them. But given that this year’s crop of UFAs was not considered to be especially deep and top-heavy with elite talent, the fact league GMs handed out more than $600 million before 9 p.m. Eastern Time Friday was truly shocking, and assuredly will lead to the type of large-scale regret normally seen at the end of Spring Breaks and European Union-related referendums.
Sure, maybe the Vancouver Canucks will surprise us all and coagulate into a serious threat to win the Stanley Cup, but most hockey people I’ve spoken to consider them a middle-of-the-road organization running as fast as it can just to maintain that position. So why throw $36 million over six years at winger Loui Eriksson, as Vancouver did Friday? Yes, he’s a more-than-solid replacement for departing veteran Radim Vrbata, but he’s also someone who’ll turn 31 years old in a couple of weeks. More importantly, in three years as a Boston Bruin, Eriksson never was able to get back to the 70-point plateau that he reached three years in a row in Dallas.
In fairness, Eriksson did have 63 points last season, but do Canucks GM Jim Benning and his staff truly believe Eriksson will be contributing at that level three or four years from today? It’s a hell of a risk, with not nearly enough upside to justify taking it. And it’s a deal that can put Vancouver in the death zone for NHL franchises – the place you are as a team when you’re just bad enough to miss the playoffs by a point or two, and too good to have a real shot at winning the NHL draft lottery. It feels like the use of salary cap room for the sake of using salary cap room, and that’s not a good feeling to have about any organization.
It was a different kind of troubling day in Detroit, where Red Wings fans have been dealing with the loss of star centre Pavel Datsyuk to his home in Russia for weeks now. With due respect to former Islanders center Frans Nielsen, Frans Nielsen is no Datsyuk, yet he still got a five-year, $26.25-million contract out of Wings GM Ken Holland – and that still wasn’t the worst pact Holland agreed to on Friday: he also handed out one-year deals to Thomas Vanek ($2.6 million) and Steve Ott ($800,000), neither of whom are considered needle-movers for a team aiming to improve. Getting veteran Darren Helm re-signed at a good rate was a victory for Holland, but the bottom line for Detroit is this: they’re not discernibly better than they were at season’s end, and unless there are further and significant changes, their quarter-century playoff streak is in serious jeopardy.
Much like Vancouver and Detroit did, a number of other franchises were spending for spending’s sake: Following the baffling trading of Taylor Hall to New Jersey Wednesday, the Oilers gave six million dollars a year for a seven-year stretch to winger Milan Lucic, who’s reached the 30-goal plateau exactly once in nine NHL seasons. The Islanders signed 30-year-old winger Andrew Ladd to a five-year, $27.5-million pact; and the Boston Bruins brought 32-year-old former Blues cornerstone center David Backes into the fold via a five-year, $30-million deal.
The problem with those three contracts had nothing to do with the players themselves, a little bit to do with average annual salary, and most to do with the length of the deals. That teams willingly agreed to tie themselves down with what most analysts project to be dead money – Buyout City three or four years down the line, in other words – spoke to the immense degree of pressure they’re under to produce.
It takes discipline to not fall into the free agent money trap at the start of every July. But every July, you can count on at least a few NHL teams to be in straits dire enough to leap headlong into it.
And on this particular beginning of July, there were more of them than usual.
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