I'm not trying to argue that Skinner's deal is not completely insane, but I can mostly understand it from BUF's standpoint. In the 3 years before Skinner signed his contract, he scored 101 goals...14th most in the league (55th in pts). No surprising guys ahead of him, except Anders Lee, who scored 1 more goal (10 fewer pts) in 2 more gp. Lee was due for a contract at the same time and signed a 7x7 (Full NTC until last 2 years where it's 15 team; compared to Skinner's full NMC). Back it up to the 4 years before signing contract and Skinner has 10th most goals.
Lee was also 2 yrs older, was coming off a bit of a down season (relative to the prior 2), and only had one other 25 goal season, and; Skinner had three (and was almost always at a 25 goal pace in his injury seasons), and was coming off a good season.
IMO BUF had to pay three 'taxes': bad location, bad team, and desperation (as we now can speculate to pacify Eichel). Obviously there is no way to quantify these as each situation is unique, but I would argue that these ‘taxes’ accumulate exponentially, not arithmetically.
One could argue that SJ paid a 'desperation tax' with E Kane (obviously good location and was seen as a good team, but they were desperate to make their aging core payoff). E Kane ranked 38th in goals and 111th in pts in the 3 yrs before he signed his 7x7 contract (essentially same age as Skinner at signing, both turned 27 in their signing off-season – Hall will turn 29 before he plays 20 games on his contract).
There are a lot of arguments to mitigate this, especially looking at things on a per game basis instead of total (though when signing a player to a 6+ yr deal, injury history is damn concerning). None of this is to say that the Skinner contract isn’t awful…again, it is. But, Buffalo’s alternative was to………………..pray? I can understand why they did it.
One of the worst thing we do as armchair GMs is hold up singular examples as comparables. Most acknowledge that Hall is a tier below guys like Panarin or Stone. Most would also argue that he is better than guys like Skinner, Lee, or E Kane (Pacioretty, JVR). IMO there are enough question marks with Hall that he should be closer to the latter group than the former from a contract valuation standpoint (Duchene might be the closest to Hall, but that’s a singular example with many significant differences). It really boils down to how many teams are seriously interested, and what kind of ‘taxes’ do they have to pay?
The most likely suitors for Hall seem to be ARI, CGY, and perhaps DAL or EDM…I think somebody will probably blow their brains out and sign a silly deal…I hope it's not us.
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