dtsdlaw

I don't think you need to pay him extra millions for one season to do this. I'd like to think that Verbeek, the coaching staff, the trainers, the team doctors, and everyone else in the organization who has a phone and a data plan have been reaching out to Drysdale all year long to check in on him and his rehab. Hopefully they're making some personal visits too. Contracts are contracts, business is business, but if Verbeek is trying to build a better team culture than what Bob "threaten you in a drunken rage" Murray had going, he'll hopefully be doing a lot more of the stuff that Jim Nill and David Poile do for their players, not just adding zeros to paychecks to make guys "feel wanted".

I just don't see this at all. The organization already did him a solid by calling him up in 2020-21 to burn a year off of his ELC. They could have just left him in San Diego to slide the first year of his contract so that this coming season would have been the final year of his ELC. So he's actually a year ahead in terms of salary paid to him than where he should have been. He got paid his full NHL salary last season for playing just 8 games too. And I guarantee that the Ducks organization is sparing no expense when it comes to doctors and PTs to try to get Drysdale back on the ice. They've invested in him, and they clearly value him. Now it's up to Drysdale to show that he's healthy, durable, productive, and worth a long term commitment. I'm also talking about a 1-year contract. If Verbeek was trying turn the screws on him with something like a 3 x $1.5M deal, that would obviously be insulting. But I don't see how a 1-year prove-you-can-stay-healthy contract would be insulting unless there's already an issue with Drysdale's ego. He doesn't strike me as being that kind of overprivileged A-hole though. I think he'll be just fine.

left-to-right, I think it's Vatrano, Dostal, Killorn, Jones, McTavish

I don't really know what "leverage for leverage's sake" means here. Verbeek isn't negotiating with his wife about who is going to do the dishes tonight. We're talking about multi-million dollar contracts, cap space, and years worth of a player being a fixture in a key role on our team's blue line. Leverage is critical. Players and agents will always maximize their leverage to get better terms for their contracts, so why shouldn't a GM also retain and use whatever leverage they have before the player is eligible for UFA status and the team loses all of its leverage? I'd also agree with you more about his learning process if it was a lower body injury. No need to rush a knee or an ankle etc., but IMO if he can skate then he should be out there on the ice skating with the team and learning the coverages, responsibilities, and breakout schemes. No need for contact and definitely tell him to not rip any slap shots until his shoulder is ready, but I don't believe think his shoulder should be impacting his ability to skate at this point. I don't think the Sanderson contract has any bearing on Drysdale's negotiations. Sanderson is in a different stratosphere than Drysdale right now. They mentioned on the DFO Rundown podcast yesterday that in the 25 years that TOI stats have been kept (i.e. since 1998), only two defensemen have averaged more than 20 mins/game, more than 2 mins/game on the PP, and more than 3 mins of PK time by age 21 - Drew Doughty and Jake Sanderson. I've also read a lot of Sens fans on social media saying that Sanderson was the team's best all around D-man last season, which is really something considering they also have Chychrun and Chabot manning their blue line. Sanderson actually led the team in PK TOI/game last season (the team was 14th best in PK%), which is pretty darn impressive for a 20-year-old rookie D-man. And he chipped in 4G/28A (same stats as Drysdale in 2021-22) despite all of those defensive responsibilities. Drysdale is going to need to show that he is a significantly better all-around defenseman this season than he has been in past seasons if he wants to use Sanderson's new contract as a comp for his own negotiations.

If his shoulder isn’t 100% then that’s a huge concern. It was supposed to be a 4-6 month recovery and we’re going on 10+ months since the surgery. As far as missing time, if he’s even close to healthy he needs to be skating with the team. Do it in a non contact jersey if need be, but he’s gotta be out there learning the new system with his teammates, especially after not playing hockey for almost a full calendar year. I also don’t think a 2-year bridge that takes him to arbitration rights makes any sense for the club. Drysdale will gain leverage in his next negotiation through good play, but there’s no reason at this point to just hand him more leverage. The Ducks should be negotiating again with him next summer when he’s still one year away from arb rights.

He has zero leverage. There's no reason for Verbeek/Solomon to bend even a little to Drysdale's agent's demands. He can't afford to sit out after missing all of last season, especially with a new coach, new system, and a whole bunch of new teammates coming in on the blueline, and by missing all of last season with injury, he even missed out on accruing a season towards arbitration rights, so he's still two seasons away from that. He's in no-man's-land contractually, which is perfectly fine for a 21-year-old who just missed an entire season. IMO, Drysdale just needs to sign a 1-year show-me contract as soon as possible and then come into camp on Day 1 with a total commitment to being the best pro he can be and then signing a big money deal next summer. If he can match his production from 2021-22 and stay healthy for the majority of the season, it'll all work out just fine for him and the team. If he plays well, he'll be handsomely rewarded for it and this will all be water off a Duck's back. But if he gets butt-hurt and doesn't give it everything he has in order to earn big contract next summer, well then that tells everyone what kind of character he has and that the team should go in a different direction.

Here's another one: I will add though that I don't think the Edmonton experience should really color Eakins' time in Anaheim, other than to just note that he does not appear to be an NHL-caliber coach after bombing out in two different NHL markets. It's probably best if he just finds a long-term AHL job and takes his sweet time to create a culture there.

It actually meshes well with some of the things that Eakins said previously when reflecting on his time in Edmonton. For example: Yakupov really struggled with the defensive side of the game. Eakins has been forthcoming about his failures in trying to force the implementation of a very complex defensive system with a very young group of forwards that didn't like to play defense (Yakupov, Hall, Eberle, Gagner, Perron). Not hard to see where the friction point would come, especially as Yakupov noted in the interview that he didn't have the English language skills at the time to really be able to adapt and learn in that environment. You get the sense that Eakins tried to remedy the failures he experienced in Edmonton by taking a different approach in San Diego and Anaheim (i.e. trying to be more of a teacher and mentor to young players) but that doesn't change the fact that he was a terrible coach for that young Edmonton team.

Geez, McTavish is going to be a bear to play against. Dude is already jacked and he's only 20-years-old. He looks like he's going to be the next Rod the Bod Brind'Amour.

The more I think about it, the best scenario I think would be a 2-year bridge at $6M/$8M ($7M AAV). That gives him an $8M QO and likely pushes him well into the $9Ms (possibly even close to $10M) for his next contact, which should be a 7 or 8 year deal. Verbeek can set the team's cap structure with his contract before McTavish and Carlsson need to be re-signed, and then Zegras can just bank on himself to still be a very good player at 31-years-old who can cash in on a retirement contract for whatever team he wants to play for. That also buys 9-10 seasons of Zegras in a Ducks sweater, which should be more than enough time for this team to become a perennial contender worthy of attracting UFAs and staying off of NTCs, so that if the Ducks have to let him walk away at age 31/32, they can be in a position to replace some of his production from elsewhere.

Boldy signed in January when he was already on pace to hit his end-of-season numbers (31G/63pts), not right after he posted a 39 point season. And Caufield had 36 points in just 46 games (on pace for 64-points in 82 games). Stutzle and Hughes both signed a full year before their ELCs expired, so those contracts were clearly based on projections, not just their most recent season. You have also said "$9.5M" and "$9M+" at various times during this discussion, so that's why I keep citing that AAV. Based on these comps, I think Zegras deserves more than Caufield, Boldy, and Cozens, but less than Hughes and Stutzle (who are both just better players than Zegras IMO). So if Verbeek can get an 8-year deal done, I think it should be an 8 x $8M at most. That said, I think Zegras would prefer a bridge contract, and I think a bridge ultimately works well for our overall cap structure long term, even if Zegras' AAV ends up north of Barzal or Point a few seasons from now.

Why do you consider it hardball to offer Zegras a contract in line with what other players his age and productivity level have gotten? If Hughes got an 8 x $8M contract and Cozens got a 7 x $7.1M contract and Boldy got a 7 x $7M contract and Caulfield got an 8 x $7.85M contract and Stutzle got an 8 x $8.35M contract, why would Zegras be insulted if he doesn't get an 8 x $9.5M contract? That doesn't make any sense to me.

I disagree with the bolded. I think a lot of players, especially the aging ones, will be replaced by young players on ELCs or on cheaper first-time RFA contracts. For example, Silfverberg is a low-end 3rd liner or a 4th liner currently at $5.25M. As soon as next season, his role on this team should be replaced by someone making roughly around $1M. I also expect that at least a few of the players whose ELCs are going to slide this season (Gaucher, Luneau, Warren, Hinds, and possibly even Mintyukov) will be getting cheaper contracts or bridge deals for their first RFA contracts four seasons from now. Not all of those guys are going to max out on their first RFA contracts, especially if we see some of the high end guys like Zegras and Drysdale leading the way this season with their own bridge deals (again, back to the team's overall cap structure!).

I find this deal especially interesting because they haven't even officially closed the sale of the Senators to the Andlauer group. Given that this contract doesn't even kick in until the 2024-25 season, this feels like Dorian was in some kind of rush to get this done before the sale was finalized.

No, I don't think Zegras will just decline a contract and sit out this season. He's too far away from UFA to do that. If a bridge deal took him to within one season of UFA like it did for Tkachuk, I think this would make me more concerned. But a 2-year bridge leaves him 3 seasons short of UFA and a 3-year bridge leaves him 2 seasons short of UFA, so that's harder to get to UFA than it was for Tkachuk, who could have just taken one year at his QO and then walked away.

I can defend the trade all day long. He was healthy when we acquired him and he scored 11 goals in 20 regular season games for the Ducks after the trade, and it looked like one of the best acquisitions of that year's trade deadline heading into the playoffs. If he'd stayed healthy in the playoffs, he honestly might have been the difference between us making it to the Cup and us going home in 6 games to Nashville. It was just really bad luck that he suffered that high ankle sprain against Edmonton that knocked him out of the rest of the playoffs The subsequent 3-year contract extension to a 33-year-old guy who missed 10/17 playoff games due to injury is harder to defend. I'd have preferred that Bob would have done what Colorado, Pittsburgh, and Boston did to us in 2022 - i.e. acquire and extend guys who are 28- or 29-years-old. Eaves would have been better as a pure rental. Regarding the #29OA pick, I guess we can all dream that our scouting staff would have identified Jason Robertson (selected 39th) as the guy we would have drafted with that pick if we hadn't traded it for Eaves, but that's all REALLY speculative, and there really aren't any other players besides Robertson that were taken at 29th or later that have amounted to much in the NHL. 2017 was not a very good draft.

Absolutely. I'd also add to this that Toronto doesn't seem to really care about their overall cap structure, so it's not really a model that I think Verbeek should be following (esp. as a "budget" team). Toronto gave the moon and the stars to 3 players, and as a result they haven't been able to put a decent defense together and now they have an elite player in Nylander wondering why he can't be paid his market value in Toronto too. If the Ducks really want to do this rebuild right, they should be trying to copy Tampa as much as possible, not Toronto. Tampa's got superstars making big money, but they also have a pretty tight cap structure, and guys who don't fit in to that structure have to move on. $9.5M is their upper limit for AAVs, and everyone else falls in line proportionally for their value to the team. And that limit was set by Kucherov and later Point, both of whom took 3-year bridge deals to establish their overall value before signing their max 8-year deals. IMO, Verbeek needs to make sure that Zegras is going to be the best player on the team before giving him a max contract, so the bridge makes sense from an organizational standpoint, even if it ends up costing a bit more. If he goes $9.5M to Zegras without seeing how Zegras develops (or even knowing what position he's going to end up playing), and then Carlsson and McTavish turn out to be significantly better players, then the team's overall cap structure breaks down and you just get each successive contract leapfrogging the last contract until gaping holes are created in other areas of the lineup. So if I were GM, I'd be bridging at least Zegras (and also McTavish) to see if I can establish a good contract structure for my team for the next decade, just like Tampa has. So if we can get Zegras at something like a 3 x $7M AAV bridge, and then he ends up on a subsequent 8 x $10.5M contract until age 33, I'd be really good with that. We'd guarantee 11 years of Zegras in Anaheim and we'd have locked in a lot of certainty to the cap structure that can keep the team really competitive for a very long time.

I think we're still going to be in pretty good cap shape five years from now, even if Carlsson, McTavish, Drysdale, Zellweger, and Mintyukov all turn into studs. Unless Verbeek adds more bad contracts, that is. But Strome and Killorn both have four more seasons on their contracts, so that's $11.25M that will come off the books. Fowler's $6.5M should be gone (or at least reduced if he comes back at a veteran discount). I don't think Gibson will still be counting $6.4M against our cap by then either. And I also think we can expect the league cap to be well into the $90Ms by then. I'm actually more concerned that ownership won't want to spend anywhere near the cap and that our internal cap will be in the mid- to high-$80Ms.

Our pick #29 became Henri Jokiharju. Dallas had traded that pick to Chicago with another asset to move up in the 1st round to get Oettinger. I’d still make that deal. The Ducks were a legit Cup contender and Jokiharju wouldn’t have moved the needle at all for our team short or long term.

Matthews scored 40 goals in his first season after being drafted, and he had 111 goals and over 200 points at the end of his ELC. I don't think Zegras should be compared to Matthews in any way.

Again, some of that is hindsight. For example, there were a lot of people salivating over Sam Steel's upside when he was still just a prospect, expecting the torch to be passed to him as our next great 1C. Which brings us to what I believe is really the only way to re-tool a veteran team - you have to be willing to trade your prospects for current NHL players that make your team more competitive in the short term. Bob never really had the stomach for that though. He was too enamored with hoarding draft picks and then keeping his prospects until they had no more utility. In fact, the only high end prospect that I can think of him trading for a true NHLer was, sadly, Wild Bill Karlsson. If he was intent on re-tooling, which I still think he could have done for another couple of playoff runs, what he should have done is put Larsson, Steel, Jones, and Comtois on the trade block as soon as they showed promise as post-draft prospects. That's how you add good players on the fly. Basically the reverse of what Colorado, Pittsburgh, and Boston did to us when they acquired Manson, Rakell, and Lindholm. We got a bunch of mid-level prospects (Clang, Vaakanainen, Helleson) who may never be legit NHLers, and those teams got top-end guys in their primes who they then re-signed to extend their Cup windows by a couple of years. That doesn't save a team from the eventual tear-down rebuild, but that's how it's done if you want to squeeze a few more competitive seasons out of your current crop of good-to-great players. Like in 2018, Sam Steel (whose value was really high at the time) + our 2018 1st (which became Lundestrom) would have put us in the conversation for Ryan O'Reilly, which could have been a game changer for a few more seasons, but there was no chance that Bob would have been willing to part with those assets even for ROR. It just wasn't in his nature to do a proper re-tool, so the Ducks got stuck in the mushy middle for a few seasons.

If you're not buying up any UFA years, the AAV should come way down. 5 x $7.75M would be more like it.

This is an easy argument to make now with the benefit of hindsight, but how do you sell this to the owners (who still want to make money), the players (esp Getzlaf and Gibson), and the fans in June 2018? IMO it’s not realistic to think you could have done that at the time.

Silf should have been traded for sure in 2019. I agree with that. But you also have to remember that Bob got extra 1st rounders in both 2019 and 2020 from the Montour and Kase trades, so it's not like he was doing nothing to bring in more assets. The assets he got just didn't work out, which is extremely common when you trade good players to playoff teams for low-end 1st rounders. And there's no reason to believe that trading Rakell or Manson earlier for late 1st rounders would have resulted in us getting players any better than Tracey or Perreault, especially considering the Ducks extremely poor track record in drafting and developing forwards. That's' also just pure speculation. btw, I know Montour wasn't traded to a playoff team, but we got San Jose's pick back from Buffalo for him, and San Jose went to the conference finals that season.

I think the arbitration numbers tend towards the extremes and the actual negotiations are more reasonable given the length of the contracts they want and the fact that some of the years included in the lengthy term will be in the player's 30s, which brings the AAV down. I suspect that Terry's ask for a long term deal was right around $7M or $7.25M, and that Verbeek's offer was somewhere in the $6Ms for that kind of term.