Last night the Blue Jackets and Cam Atkinson agreed to a seven year contract extension.
The total value of the deal is $41.125M averaging out to a yearly cap hit of $5.875M per season. Atkinson has a full no trade and no move in the first two years of the deal and a limited no-trade clause in the last five.
It was just yesterday
I wrote my thoughts on an Atkinson extension and thought the two sides would be negotiating throughout the season. That was not the case, both sided were very motivated to get this done.
This deal will keep Atkinson in Columbus until the 2024-25 season, and covers his age 29-35 seasons. The initial reaction to this deal has to be positive. Atkinson is an elite goal scorer in a league where it’s becoming increasingly harder to score. Over the last three seasons (including this season), Atkinson has scored 66 goals, one of just 25 players to have over 60. This is the type of player teams have just one of, you want to keep them around.
This kind of goal scoring talent doesn’t come cheaply so to get Atkinson for under $6M is a win for the Blue Jackets. If Atkinson had of reached free agency he surely would have been looking for a deal in the $6-7M range. In order to get that lower cap hit the Jackets had to step up with the term and that’s where some of the concern comes in.
The deal will be fine for the first couple seasons. The concern level starts to rise in the back-half of this deal. If Atkinson can’t maintain this scoring pace into his mid-thirties (and most players can’t), that is a lot of money tied up to a potentially unproductive player. As I mentioned yesterday this type of deal has the potential to end up like Scott Hartnell’s did. Hartnell was a productive player with the Jackets but his cap hit was too high for what he was proving and they ended up having to buy him out. I don’t foresee the Jackets buying Atkinson out, but I could see him being a bit of a sunk cost in the back-half of this deal.
Another concern with this deal is that while it was market value, deals similar to this haven’t worked out so well for the teams. Look at the closest comparable deals from Cap Friendly.
Outside of the Kyle Turris deal, the rest of these deals are pretty bad, and were pretty bad right after they were signed. That’s the risk you take when you sign a player who is quickly approaching the wrong side of 30. You're paying for the players past performance not what they are going to provide in the future.
Bringing the positivity back, getting this deal done now gives the Jackets plenty of time to figure out how they want to go about this trade deadline and off-season. Looking ahead to the off-season the Jackets have four big restricted free agents to sign in Boone Jenner, Oliver Bjorkstrand, Ryan Murray and Markus Nutivaara. They also have Matt Calvert and Jack Johnson who are pending unrestricted free agents. That is of players to re-sign so getting Atkinson done now makes things a bit easier in the summer, plus gives the team an idea the amount of dollars they are going to have to re-sign these players and potentially spend on a free agent.
Atkinson is a core piece of the Blue Jackets, and this seven year deal will potentially make him a Blue Jacket for life. He’s an elite goal scorer in this league and while that is going to drop off, the Jackets are hopefully that won’t be for another couple of seasons. The Blue Jackets are trying to win right now and keeping Cam Atkinson around certainly helps with that.
You can follow me on Twitter
@PaulBerthelot 
Columbus Blue Jackets Blogger • 
Join the Discussion:
»