[JerryUnderscore]

I suspect part of why the negotiations are taking so long is at least two-fold:

1. These guys aren't all sitting in a room together trying to hash this out. Treliving is in Calgary running the team, Monahan is in Toronto working out and Johnny's location is unknown (at least to me, my guess would be back in the Philly area?).

Furthermore, Tre isn't communicating directly with the players. He's communicating with the agents that communicate with the players that communicate back to the agents and then back to Tre. This process of telephone is probably going to take a while, especially since they all have other things going on. Monahan and Gaudreau are working out a ton, the agents have other clients as well and Tre has a team to run, which means meeting with his management staff, time spent looking into other FA signings as depth, etc.

None of this is out of the ordinary, but the reality is that they all have other aspects to their life/job that are not directly tied to this contract negotiation however important this contract is.

2. We, for the most part, are looking at this contract based on two factors term and AAV. However, when negotiating the actually contracts, not only are they talking about term and AAV, but they have to figure out how much of that money gets paid in what years. How much of that money is salary version bonuses. Of the bonus money what is performance and what is signing bonus.

What about MNC/NTC? In what years should a MNC or MTC clause be included? What are the stipulations of said clauses?

There are a ton of moving parts in these contracts.

I suspect (although I have no direct evidence to support this) that they've landed on the term and AAV a long time ago, but all the little details of the contract are still being worked out through this telephone game between GM, agent, and player as they work around all the other duties they have going on on any given day.