Weekend Notes: Tkachuk Negotiations Dragging, thoughts on the Zub/Chabot Pairing
After prized restricted free agents Elias Pettersson and Quinn Hughes agreed to contracts with the Vancouver Canucks yesterday, TSN ‘Insider’ Pierre LeBrun discussed the situation with Brady Tkachuk on last night’s broadcast.
“Certainly, when I checked into it last night, it’s still not the kind of progress that both sides had hoped for,” explained LeBrun. “Huge for the Ottawa Senators, to me, to make this an eight-year deal or at least a six-year deal. If this ends up a bridge deal — a three-year deal — that’s a red flag to me in terms of Brady Tkachuk’s future in Ottawa.
“So, they’re apart on AAV last time I checked. It’s imperative to me… you know, the Mark Stone exit wasn’t that long ago. This is a fragile market, I think, about keeping your star players.”
After what was an incredibly quiet offseason for the Senators in terms of player management, it is disappointing that this has reached a stage of the negotiation process where the possibility of this dragging into the regular season is real.
Ideally, with four exhibition games during the next week, the two parties can agree to something quickly to ensure that Tkachuk gets some game action in before the start of the regular season.
LeBrun’s right in saying that the Senators need a long-term deal more than Tkachuk does. They need something tangible that they can hold up to fans and say, “The face of the franchise wants to be here long-term and we got him to give up the first few years of unrestricted eligibility to do it.”
Any kind of bridge deal will send off warning signs. For a franchise that repeatedly promises fans that management has the unconditional support of ownership to build a contender, the Senators need to put their money where their mouth is.
TSN’s Shawn Simpson has reported on a number of occasions that the biggest holdups in negotiations are structure and bonuses.
The Senators have never been shy about acquiring players whose contracts contain signing bonuses. Often in these instances, they acquire players whose bonuses have already been paid (ie. Derick Brassard) to acquire higher cap hit players while simultaneously curtailing actual costs. Internally, since the Mika Zibanejad a two-year contract extension on June 25, 2015, that carried a signing bonus of $200,000, I don’t believe the Senators have agreed to include signing bonuses for a player under team control who wasn’t on an entry-level deal. The last big signing bonus that they paid out belonged to Bobby Ryan. The winger signed his seven-year, $50.75 million contract in October of 2014. Each of his seven years contained a $2.0 million signing bonus.
Whether it is a liquidity issue or stems from lingering animosity created by the messy Dany Heatley divorce in which owner Eugene Melnyk eventually settled and recouped some of his signing bonus, the Senators’ appear to have an informal policy in which players do not receive signing bonuses.
Using CapFriendly’s contract history tool, for the start of the 2015-16 season, there were 58 standard player contracts that contained signing bonuses of $200,000 or greater. This season, there are 112 contracts. Their inclusion in contracts isn’t getting smaller, they are just becoming more frequent.
From a competitive balance perspective, if signing bonuses are a thing that Melnyk refuses to budge on, it creates another competitive imbalance obstacle that Pierre Dorion will have to navigate and overcome. If it means offering more money in average annual value (AAV) or in trade protection, so be it.
If the reports are true and Brady Tkachuk is indicating a willingness to give up the first few years of unrestricted free agency, the organization needs to step up and deliver the protection and bonus structure that Tkachuk wants.
As the next captain of this franchise, he has all the leverage. If the Senators simply cannot pay him bonuses, they will need to take a step back and change their messaging. Between the promises of spending to the cap threshold and using Bruce Garrioch as a vehicle to ensure fans that the owner will do whatever it takes to make this team competitive, there needs to be some accountability and follow through.
This team cannot continue to break promises. Tkachuk’s next contract is the litmus test. This is a show-me moment for the franchise and if they fuck it up, the distrust will continue to grow. The Senators may not be able to afford a signing bonus, but they sure as hell cannot afford to let apathy set in either.
Chabot/Zub
During last night’s preseason game against the Canadiens, the Thomas Chabot and Arytom Zub played together for 12 minutes and 43 seconds of five-on-five ice-time per NaturalStatTrick.
When they were on the ice together, the Senators scored three goals to Montreal’s none while generating 81.82 percent of the total shots, 80.0 percent of the shots on goal, 92.86 percent of the scoring chances and 86.62 percent of the expected goals.
They were unbelievable and together, they give the Senators what could be one of the best pairings that the team has had in recent history. I have written at length about how important it is to keep Nikita Zaitsev away from Chabot because of his inability to recover and transition the puck from defence to offence. Zaitsev’s a competent defender, but plays die on his stick. With Zub being the team’s best right defender and a noted insulator who tends to make the players around him better, this is an opportunity for Chabot to really get back to playing at the high level that we are accustomed to.
I joked last night on Twitter that Zub’s underlying metrics are sustainable playing exclusively with Chabot, but these two players should be poised to have a great season in Ottawa. The only downside is that if they do demonstrate chemistry and play at a high level, the Senators will be kicking themselves for giving Zub a two-year deal. If the intent was to play him with Chabot this season, the smart money would have been to give a long-term deal with a higher AAV than the $2.5 million that he’s getting now. If this duo kills it as the team improves around them, Zub is going to have a lot of negotiating leverage when he hits unrestricted free agency in 2023.