[FanIn80]

Originally Posted by Vinny01

Dom on the Athletic released his 10 best and 10 worst contracts in the league this week.

Tkachuk was ranked the best deal league wide and Huberdeau was listed as 3rd worst.

Huberdeau https://theathletic.com/4690343/2023...yko-huberdeau/

Spoiler!

#3 Huberdeau

Contract: $10.5M x eight years
Surplus Value: -$33.5M
Positive Value Probability: 15 percent

Whoever Jonathan Huberdeau’s agent is deserves a lot of credit for cashing in at the perfect time with a desperate franchise on a deal that would likely one day turn into an albatross contract.

What few could’ve imagined is that day coming before the contract even kicked in.

There were some red flags during Huberdeau’s “MVP” calibre season in 2021-22, and the following season in a new locale offered a chance for Huberdeau to prove them wrong. In Calgary under Darryl Sutter, he had an opportunity to be The Guy and improve his defensive standing.

From Calgary’s perspective, it would’ve been awfully wise to actually see Huberdeau prove those things wrong before giving him $84 million. Extending a 29-year-old who is a year out from free agency before he played a single game for the team after a career year should’ve been an extraordinarily easy thing to not do. But the Flames — fresh off a jilted split with two franchise players — did it anyway, and they’re left with a contract that looks dead on arrival. In Year 1, Huberdeau projects to be only an $8 million player … and it gets so much worse from there.

From that vantage point, it’s easy to see why Huberdeau’s new deal lands as the third worst in hockey. He scored just 55 points in 79 games last year — less than half of what he had the year before — and he’s now entering his 30s where the decline is much more swift and sudden. At his price tag, the expectation for the next eight years is a Net Rating of plus-11 and while Huberdeau isn’t projected to be far off that next season, Father Time will make that mountain a much steeper climb.

Having said that, this is still Jonathan Huberdeau, a player who scored 115 points in 2021-22 and was a consistent 90-point threat before that. This is also a player who came to a new team with a coach who struggled to get the best out of anyone last season. A bounce-back feels extremely likely next season for a player as talented as Huberdeau, one that should reignite Huberdeau’s game and tilt his future trajectory back in his favour. The model does expect a bounce-back to 80 points, but there’s a chance for a bigger one considering how far he fell last season.

Maybe not all the way back to that of a fair deal — he is in his 30s, after all — but it wouldn’t be a shock to not see Huberdeau on this list next season. He arguably has the most skill to do so of anyone on this list.

Tkachuk https://theathletic.com/4687006/2023...-hughes-makar/

Spoiler!

#1 Tkachuk

Contract: $9.5M x seven years
Surplus Value: $49.7M
Positive Value Probability: 96 percent

It’s still extremely difficult to believe that the Florida Panthers were able to lock up Matthew Tkachuk for eight years at a price tag under $10 million per season.

Tkachuk was coming off a career year where he had entrenched himself as a franchise winger. Maybe it was a safer bet for him to cash in on that and not risk a down year away from Calgary’s 2021-22 super line with Elias Lindholm and Johnny Gaudreau. But it still felt ludicrous given his age, what he had already shown and with a rising salary cap looming. At the time it already looked like one of the biggest steals in the NHL; a year later that’s only been confirmed further after an MVP-caliber season.

The Panthers superstar posted arguably the most impactful season at five-on-five in the analytics era. What Florida did while Tkachuk was on the ice was unprecedented, leading to another career year in points. Then he took that a step further in the playoffs where he was A Problem to every team that faced him. Tkachuk is a unicorn in this league, a very rare blend of power and finesse, shooting and passing, offense and defense.

He does it all and he does it all well and that’s turned him into a player firmly in the conversation for one of the NHL’s five best. Tkachuk is definitively the league’s best winger and can influence the game at a high level from the flank.

That’s a player that should be worth 17.5 percent of the salary cap on average over the next seven seasons — a cap hit that lands between $15-$17 million during the life of his contract. Instead, Tkachuk will be paid closer to 10 percent, which is in line with the 50th highest cap hit percentage in the league.