What would you pay Eric Staal? (Trending Topics)
There was a rumor going around this week, since kinda-debunked by Bob McKenzie, that Eric Staal wants a $9 million AAV for his next contract.
The partial refutation from McKenzie was that Staal and the Hurricanes haven't even begun to discuss the dollars and cents of the new contract, and even the initial rumor from Renaud Lavoie indicates that while that might be what Staal wants, it's not necessarily what he thinks he'll get.
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Which he shouldn't, because he's not worth anything close to $9 million and he and his agent know that just as much as anyone else. Asking for $9 million for a player like Staal — declining, past 30, no longer even a center as far as his team is concerned — might as well be asking for the league maximum, which this year is $14.28 million. By degrees, you're not really being that much more ludicrous with your initial ask.
No one is going to give Eric Staal, who hasn't broken 70 points in a full season since 2012, anywhere near that much money, and if they do well, they have bigger problems than the albatross contract they just gave him. But this does raise the question of what is a reasonable contract request from this player.
It was technically not that long ago that he was a more or less annual lock to clear 70 points. He did it every year from 2005-06 — when he scored 100 and won a Cup, setting career expectations too lofty for all but the game's all-time legends to live up to — and even scored 53 in 48 in the lockout season. But as a 29-year-old two seasons ago he scored only 61, and followed that up with 54 this past year. Guys generally don't get over a 156-game hump like that when they're 31 and beyond.
He actually turned in a pretty good two-way season overall in 2014-15, but one would imagine that such an uptick (from a plus-0.75 WAR to 2.29) doesn't necessarily mean he's once again found whatever made him such a great player back just a few years ago. Keep in mind, he saw his position changed to the wing, which relieves some of his defensive responsibilities, and also found himself on a line with brother Jordan Staal for much of the season, which is going to help anyone look better.
That, however, also came with a considerable drop in per-60 production for both goals and primary points (goals plus first assists), at declines of 10.7 percent and 36.8 percent. Yes, he was still playing a solid all-around game, but you pay guys with $8.25 million cap hits — Eric Staal has an $8.25 million cap hit, folks — to put up points, and Staal simply didn't do it. Again, this is not a skill he's likely to rediscover as time marches on.
But even a WAR that good, and the position change, doesn't put him in the top-15 left wings in the league last season. Among guys he finished behind in this regard were Mathieu Perreault and Justin Abdelkader. Both of them had career seasons, but come on. If you were putting together a list of the best left wings in the game, would Staal realistically be anywhere near the top of it?
Let's put it another way: The two best left wings in hockey right now are Taylor Hall and Jamie Benn. Let's add in Max Pacioretty, Daniel Sedin, Zach Parise, Gabriel Landeskog, Brandon Saad, Patrick Sharp, Milan Lucic, Evander Kane, Rick Nash, maybe a few other guys. You'd rightly take all of them over a 31-year-old Eric Staal. And the price point for those guys understandably doesn't begin to even approach $9 million. I'm willing to pass that absurd number off as a negotiating tactic and nothing more, but if that's even your jumping-off point you're out of your mind.
Currently, the number of left wings who make even $8 million per season is zero. The average left wing with a top-10 AAV for the position only makes $6.55 million or so, with a max of $7.8 million for Nash, and a minimum of $5.9 million for Sharp. If you were re-signing either one today — they're both 30-plus — it's likely those numbers wouldn't be approached. For the record, only five players in the league make more than $9 million at all, and Staal ain't Kane/Toews/Ovechkin/Malkin/Subban good.
This isn't a “Brent Seabrook” case, where Staal is going to be looking for money he didn't-get on a previous contract. He was, in fact, overpaid for the bulk of his soon-to-expire seven-year deal. His actual salary in the last three seasons alone was $28 million (which by the way is basically ex-Canes GM Jim Rutherford screaming, “I don't understand when players peak or indeed how to value them in the first place!”) so this isn't one of those make-whole contracts you occasionally see.
Staal, more than other players in a similar situation age- and production-wise, should get exactly what's coming to him, no more and no less. Which means you need to start pulling comparables. Which means you need to look at War on Ice's Similarity Scores tool and start fooling with the filters.
From where I sit, that's pretty good company. Closely comparing to Justin Williams is never a bad thing, and in fact, Williams' name pops up three times on that list. If you're basically Justin Williams, that's solid. The other guys on this list are all pretty good as well (or at least had insane, career-best years). You'll notice that they carried an average cap hit of about $5.5 million in the seasons in which they were so close to Staal's latest campaign — well below Staal's silly $8.25 million — and by the time they turned 31, which Staal will be for the majority of the first year of his new contract, they were pulling the equivalent of $4.7 million in today's money.
Frankly, that “feels” a little low for what Staal might be able to do even for a few years, but it's better for teams to err on the side of underpaying guys past the age of 30 (well, teams should try to underpay everyone, but you get the point). Hedging bets on guys on the wrong side of the Big Three-Oh is usually going to pay off for you, and overpaying hoping to hit the jackpot usually isn't.
Because that's the other thing with Staal: He's going to want term if he can't get cash. And he shouldn't get cash. So if you're signing a guy for, say, his age-31-through-36 seasons, you're going to want to keep the dollar value as depressed as possible. This number would constitute a paycut of more than 40 percent, but that's only fair because he was overpaid by at least 20 percent (and often more) in each of the last seven years.
In an ideal world Staal can be had for about $5 million AAV, give or take, and fewer than four years. The “fewer than four years” part should be league policy on guys older than 30, but y'know. That's probably not realistic, but that's what it should be.
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He's still a good or perhaps even very good player, but he was basically never worth $8.25 million, and it's going to skew his valuation for basically the rest of his career. However long that is.
Ryan Lambert is a Puck Daddy columnist. His email is here and his Twitter is here.
All stats via War on Ice unless otherwise stated.
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