[FlamesAddiction]

Originally Posted by Weitz

"Not ranked this week: The Deryk Engelland contract.

All that talk about the worst contract of the day? Don't worry about it. Calgary, predictably, has it sewn up.

A team that was already slated to pay Brian McGrattan and Brandon Bollig a combined $2 million next season is now also going to pay Deryk Engelland $2.9 million — a raise of about 500 percent — on top of that. Right after they bought out Shane O'Brien, who in all honesty isn't much worse than Engelland, and would have been $900,000 cheaper against the cap, and would have been gone next summer.

This is very clearly a sign that Brian Burke's influence on the team's decision-making has not changed despite the fact that he is no longer GM.

Either that, or Brad Treliving has no idea at all what he's doing, and in either case, that's bad news for the Flames' chances going forward. On a day in which Brooks Orpik got five years and $5.25 million per, the fact that there was even a close second here — for a team still in search of “toughness” despite having too much of it already — tells you everything about what a disaster this franchise is. Good lord.

Treliving said in the wake of the signing that Engelland has been “undervalued” for a while, so one assumes he thought he'd make up for that by overvaluing him to a ludicrous extent.

Poor Sam Bennett. Poor Sean Monahan. Poor Johnny Gaudreau. Poor Flames fans."

Some may not like the source, from my scouring of the internet this seems to be the general consensus around the league.

Very bottom of this article:

http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/nhl-pu...154852827.html

Given that we are a rebuilding team whose only cap issue is that we need to reach the floor, the most important part of any contract is term at this point (not dollars). In fact, term is more important to most teams these days. Any writer that doesn't see that isn't worth the paper they are writing on.

The fact of the matter is, by the time this team is going to be needing to re-sign important players, Engelland will be off the books. His presence here is to help create an environment for our prospects to play without being pushed around too much. I also think that Engelland could have gotten a longer deal for less money yearly, but more in the long run on a lot of teams and in 3 years, he won't have a lot of negotiating power like does now. Taking a short deal demands extra financial compensation. It's a big risk for him.