DETROIT – Look no further than Oliver Ekman-Larsson's recent six-year, $33 million extension with Phoenix as one reason why the Wild will have to be cautious adding expensive, long-term contracts via free agency or trades the next few years.
For instance, if Jonas Brodin develops the way the Wild expects, he could compare to Ekman-Larsson when Brodin's entry-level deal expires in two years. The early signs under the new collective bargaining agreement are that second contracts will still be lucrative, if not inflated.
With prospects like Charlie Coyle, Jason Zucker, Mikael Granlund and even Johan Larsson, Brett Bulmer and Zack Phillips all on entry-level deals at the same time — and Jared Spurgeon and Marco Scandella at the end of entry-level deals — the Wild has to be able to afford to re-sign its own in a few years.
"I don't know if it precludes us from making every move, but I don't know how smart it would be to take on a lot more long-term commitments at this point," General Manager Chuck Fletcher said. "Certainly you can go out and add a player that is on a shorter term type of contract.
"But it's something we've been looking at for a while. You always want to stay ahead of it, but everyone's going to mature at different stages."
The big issue with long-term deals is teams usually are paying more on projection than production.
"Sometimes you want to get ahead of the curve and get into these long-term deals and project what guys are going to do and pay them as you think they'll progress," Fletcher said. "We've just got to make sure we avoid bad contracts just to keep our flexibility. There's going to be that tension, who do you try to go long-term with and how do you stagger the contracts, but we'll figure it out."
In the NHL, players can't have contracts extended until the last year of their deals, so the Wild doesn't have to start worrying about re-signing its top prospects for some time.
