[Signing] Ducks sign Gibson to 8 year contract extension ($6.4 mil AAV)

[monkeyman]

Good long term deal for a young goalie who's had a lot of success and is yet to hit his prime.

[Inglewood Jack]

signing Gibson long term isn't going to prevent Perry and Kesler from sliding into oblivion, and Getzlaf following them a couple years later. I'm confident the Flames are going to progressively smack the Ducks around more and more with each season that passes by.

[Enoch Root]

Originally Posted by Cali Panthers Fan

If you believe in WAR ratings to measure player contributions to the team, Gibson was by far the best goalie last year in that metric, and the only goalie in the top 30 players in the league. This is a steal of a deal for a goalie that will probably win a Vezina or two over the span of that contract.

As a Flames fan, this sucks.

Does that sound sensible to you though? If you didn't know which goalie had the top WAR ranking and you had to guess, how many goalies would you go through before you said Gibson? For me it would be quite a few.

I find - consistently - that the WAR rankings line up no where near how I view players and their value. I mean sure, the best players will have good numbers no matter what metrics you use, but I find there are a lot of head scratching results with WAR as it currently stands.

[DoubleK]

WAR is backward looking.

It's a useful statistic, but not as good as some analyists make it out to be.

Pretty easy to be a genius after the fact.

[Cali Panthers Fan]

All stats are backwards looking. Kind of a silly statement to make.

I dunno, gamescore and WAR for goalies is relatively straightforward to me. There aren't nearly as many variables as there are for skaters, and I think this list for last season looks pretty strong for the goalie rankings.

https://www.corsicahockey.com/nhl/pl...nkings/goalies

Top 10 are (backups included):

Gibson
Bobrovsky
Crawford
Fleury
Raanta
Rinne
Luongo
Lundqvist
Quick
Dell

The only slightly surprising ones are Raanta because the Coyotes didn't have a great year, but all reports indicated that he really performed better as the season went on and held a terrible Coyotes team in a lot of games. The other slightly surprising one was Aaron Dell, but in a relatively small sample he played quite well for the Sharks. I can think of a game or two against the Flames where he absolutely stoned them (not hard to do last year). Other than that, those would definitely be the goalies I would have considered to be major positive contributors to their team's success, dragging their team along in some cases.

Then there is a large group all clustered around the same WAR value of 75, and that's where most of the good, but not great, starters are, including guys like Hellebuyck, Holtby, Vasilevsky, Jones, and even Mike Smith.

One interesting thing to note is that everyone's favorite backup last year was Carter Hutton, as he almost stole the starting job away from a bad Jake Allen. His WAR was 73.89, putting him in that group of 1B starters like James Reimer. Ranked immediately behind him at 73.82 was Jon Gillies (limited sample notwithstanding). I find that interesting and encouraging, and it tells me that we should perhaps give Gillies a little longer look in the NHL to see if he's at least ready to be a backup, but perhaps even become a 1B starter behind Smith, and maybe even groom him for the starting job in a year or two.

If you go down the list further, you will see the who's who of goalies who had bad years, with the likes of Elliott, Howard, Price, Markstrom, Lehner, Allen etc. The only surprising goalie in that group is Tuukka Rask, but it might have a lot to do with the Bruins ability to suppress shots as a team.

Now that's just one year, so I won't pretend that it validates the stat, but I do find it more useful than straight GAA and Sv%.

[FBI]

Where was Rittich?

[Cali Panthers Fan]

Originally Posted by FBI

Where was Rittich?

Uh, not as good unfortunately. Ranked 55th in the league (which isn't terrible for a backup) ranked in the same group as guys like Petr Mrazek, Darcy Kuemper, and Anton Khudobin, who are all solid NHLers at least. I have a feeling that his bad starts once Smith went down really sewered his numbers, because before that he was pretty much lights out in the backup role. Clearly Gillies did better in that tough situation of being the de facto starter.

It's comforting to me to see that he was ahead of both Chad Johnson and Cam Ward, guys that everyone wanted to bring in to solidify the backup role here. I think at the very least Rittich is a better answer than either of those guys at this point in their career.

[1qqaaz]

Gibson is the only goalie to have 92% or more over the past three seasons.
This past season he has 92.6% in 60 games.

You could argue that he's presently the best goalie on earth.
But will he stay healthy?

[Jay Random]

Originally Posted by 1qqaaz

Gibson is the only goalie to have 92% or more over the past three seasons.
This past season he has 92.6% in 60 games.

You could argue that he's presently the best goalie on earth.

Or you could argue that he is the product of the extremely solid defensive play in front of him, limiting the number of difficult shots he has to face. We have often seen goalies who had stellar numbers with one team and looked like bums on another. A few of those goalies have played for the Flames in the ‘looked like bums’ stage.

When a goalie has played his whole professional career for one team, it is extremely difficult to tell how much of his performance is on him and how much on the team. There are exceptions: Carey Price, for instance. One reason we know how good Price is (or used to be) is that the Montreal Canadiens looked like Cup contenders with him in the net, and immediately became one of the worst teams in the league when he was injured. You expect a team to play worse without its starting goalie, but not by such a huge margin as that.

[Strange Brew]

If Gibson was a UFA I’d take him on this contract 100 times out of a 100.

[Jay Random]

Originally Posted by Strange Brew

If Gibson was a UFA I’d take him on this contract 100 times out of a 100.

But he wasn't a UFA, so judging his contract based on the pay scale of UFAs is not valid.

[Strange Brew]

Originally Posted by Jay Random

But he wasn't a UFA, so judging his contract based on the pay scale of UFAs is not valid.

It covers one year of RFA status for him? This is a great contract and my point is that I would take him on this deal. The term is a gamble well worth taking considering the likely payoff.

Imagine paying $6.4 million for the most important player in your team and the cap is around $90 million? Starting goalies were making that money when the cap was 2/3 of that number IIRC.

[Jay Random]

Originally Posted by Strange Brew

Imagine paying $6.4 million for the most important player in your team and the cap is around $90 million?

I'm having a tough time imagining that the same guy is going to be the most important player on the team for eight years running. It doesn't normally work that way.

[Scroopy Noopers]

Originally Posted by Jay Random

I'm having a tough time imagining that the same guy is going to be the most important player on the team for eight years running. It doesn't normally work that way.

Well if the most important player on your team has a contract around $6mil starting in 2019 then you’re already ahead of the game.

[Jay Random]

Originally Posted by Scroopy Noopers

Well if the most important player on your team has a contract around $6mil starting in 2019 then you’re already ahead of the game.

And if your backup goalie has a contract around $6mil in 2024?

[Cali Panthers Fan]

Originally Posted by Jay Random

And if your backup goalie has a contract around $6mil in 2024?

Oh that's easy, trade him to the new expansion team and watch him go to the cup finals.

[Scroopy Noopers]

Originally Posted by Jay Random

And if your backup goalie has a contract around $6mil in 2024?

I just see it as a low risk that Gibson isn’t at least a top 20 goalie in the league for the duration of this contract. With a decent cap hit going forward for a starting goalie. I’d be ecstatic if the Flames locked up a goalie of his caliber on this contract, regardless of free agent status.

His upside is top 5 goalie every year (but I don’t think he’s THAT good, and that team needs a few upgrades).

[Strange Brew]

Originally Posted by Jay Random

And if your backup goalie has a contract around $6mil in 2024?

Every contract has risk. The upside on this deal is so much greater than the risk.

[Northendzone]

As a. Omplete aside, I saw somewhere in social media that he also got married over the weekend, I would assume that he likely had a very good night.

[The Cobra]

I often find that Posters here like to downgrade other teams contracts.

Now that's likely on lots of message boards.

But suggesting this is a bad contract is quite home time.

You get a great contract at a very reasonable rate, you jump on it. Sure it's 8 years.

But do you want to risk letting him go UFA in a year's time?

Calgary went only 6 years with Johnny at his choice, they would have loved to sign him for 8 years.