What a bargain! The Lightning won the staring contest as hockey agent Gerry Johansson and his client Brayden Point blinked and the Lightning inked Point to a three-year contract with an AAV of $6.75M. The bridge-deal gives the Lightning room to exhale now that their core is secure for the next few seasons. It also buys them time to rid themselves of superfluous players.
Even though the Lightning have an unwavering commitment to signing their star players to bridge deals, I still find the Point’s number staggering. Somehow, the Lightning are paying their superstar center, who is just entering his prime scoring years, the same amount of money as they pay Ryan McDonagh, who is their No. 2 defenseman and just hit 30. It is Tier II money for a Tier 1 player. Point’s contract is closer to Yanni Gourde’s money than Steven Stamkos’s, despite Point being arguably as good or better than the captain. More than anything, this seems like a triumph for precedent. A player who shows star promise on his entry-level deal knows the Lightning will play hardball, regardless of the optics.
Looking outside the roster to see what the market is dictating is illuminative. Mitch Marner—who is arguably Point’s equal in talent and production, and plays wing instead of center, arguably a less valuable position—received a six-year contract with an AAV of $10.89M. Sebastian Aho, another wing, got $8.45M for five years. According to The Athletic, right wing Mikko Rantanen is being offered somewhere in the Aho range for price, and more term. Heck, Brock Boeser is a good player, but Point’s contract is not that much higher than the Canucks’ right wing, and he’s never played more than 70 games in a season, nor eclipsed 60 points. They are not in the same age bracket, but Point will make less than Kevin Hayes over the next three seasons. That is stunning.
Most importantly, by extending Point, the Lightning now have their full complement heading into the season and there are many beneficiaries. It is worth reviewing a few of the biggest.
Tyler Johnson: Tyler Johnson and Point have a bond. Johnson will stick his body in the low slot, and Point is more than happy to feed Johnson on the doorstep. Johnson also drives to the net well, so when Point wants to push the pace and race up the ice, Johnson has the motor and body control to set himself up for the pass from Point. In the sequence below, Johnson spurs the counterattack off the turnover, and he wins the race along the weak side, where he deposits the pass from Point.
The two played together for 729 minutes at 5v5, and Johnson only played 330 minutes apart from Point. The roughly 30 percent of the time Johnson played without Point did not go well.
When Johnson is with Point, they control 52.98 of shot attempts at 5v5. Without Point, Johnson’s Corsi for percentage is 45.91. As a duo, they have a +47 Scoring Chances differential. But without Point as a linemate, the Scoring Chances differential for Johnson is -38. Johnson still has speed and pluckiness, which enabled him to collect 29 goals last year, tying a career high. But Johnson doesn’t vibe with every player.
When Johnson played with Steven Stamkos, they had a Corsi percentage of 45 and a Scoring Chances differential of -23. Johnson’s line with Nikita Kucherov and Ondrej Palat managed a -7 Corsi Plus-Minus, third worst on the Lightning. With Point, Johnson has a passer who will look for him just above the crease, and conversely, Point has a player who can help made the defense pivot in uncomfortable, clunky ways.
Nikita Kucherov: Kucherov is uniquely capable of playing the role of playmaker on his own scoring chance. But while his inimitable puck-handling gives him agency to create his own shot in the regular season, in the playoffs that time and space disappears. Having Point, who when paired with Kucherov is an especially reluctant shooter, act as a custodian of the puck allows Kucherov to work off the puck and crush shots. The Lightning should prod Kucherov to relinquish the duties of carrying the puck in on entries and have Point assume all logistical duties.
As great as Kucherov is at transporting the puck over long distances, the greatest skill he gives the Lightning is his shooting, and this is essential for the playoffs. Kucherov can bomb it like few who have ever played in the NHL. The Lightning should encourage him to shoot as much as possible because every shot from him can go in, regardless of where he is on the ice. Having a sniper is fantastic, but having a proficient distributor like Point who can barge through the thicket of nearly any NHL defense and put it on Kucherov’s stick is invaluable. And Kucherov can intuit where to recede when he is without the puck.
Kucherov certainly has an argument for being the best in the NHL at retreating to the weak side and whacking a one-timer off his back foot into a corner of the net. The Lightning failed to gin up any offense off the forecheck against Columbus, and they are a team that prefers to play fast and attack off the rush. Transition defense is hard to keep tight gaps on, which is why the Point-Kucherov combo could stay lethal in the tight-checking style of play that characterizes the postseason.
Steven Stamkos: Point makes Stamkos’s life easier. When Point is in the lineup, Stamkos can play with Kucherov because any line centered by Point can still manufacture goals. This also relieves the stress on Stamkos’s inevitable decline. No one is quite sure when it will happen, but Stamkos is turning 30 this year. His prime is ending at some point in the next few seasons, and Point’s ascendance as a transformational superstar mitigates that slippage.
The Lightning Power Play: We know what the Lightning power play looks like without Brayden Point. It looks like 2017-18, when the bumper spot was occupied by Alex Killorn. The Lightning still finished third in the NHL, and Kucherov and Stamkos were extremely dangerous shooters from the dots. That said, when Point replaced Killorn in the middle of 2018-19, the Bolts led the NHL with the man advantage, and their conversion percentage went up by 4.3. The advantage Point brings is flexibility, but the Lightning’s power play showed limited imagination last season.
The Lightning power play was so dominant during the regular season that by the end it grew stale, relying on the brilliance of shooters to mask the predictability of the puck movement. Kucherov always stayed on the right dot, Point never moved from the middle slot, and Stamkos remained along the left dot. The puck was always going into the middle, and the efforts to shovel it to one of the shooters was clunky. Hopefully this season, the Lightning show more ingenuity in their sets and move their three star shooters around.
Vegas Insider has the Lightning as the favorite at 6/1 to win the Cup. The Lightning have the talent to make a deep run in this postseason, but most importantly, they will get multiple shots to capture a Cup now that their nucleus is entrenched in Tampa Bay. Point’s extension ensures that.