Quote:
Originally Posted by Wolven
It wasn't impossible to re-sign him after the bridge, it was just significantly harder to do so because he had all of the leverage. Setting a player up to be an RFA with 1 year until UFA means he can go to arbitration and get a 1 year contract and walk himself to free agency.
This is exactly what he said he would do and how he forced his trade.
Had Brad not backed himself into a corner by giving Tkachuk a bridge contract then he would have signed an 8 year deal in 2019 that would have ended in 2027-28. Who knows how many other decisions would have changed with him committed to that term.
This brings me back to the current Zary situation. Give him a 1 year deal to get back on track but do not give him a 3 year deal that gets him to that "1 year RFA (Arb)" status and hand him that same leverage to take a 1 year deal and become a UFA. We should only need 1 season of him being healthy to validate he is worth the 7-8 year extension.
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Tkachuk would not have signed an 8 year contract in 2019. He mentioned once (after the fact) he would have signed an “long term contract”, but then he said something like “like 5 years”). He wasn’t going to give up more than a couple UFA years. He wanted to play in the US, he had his dad’s mercenary outlook, and he was savvy about PR (and he was and is still not shy about putting a knife in through the press later on).