Devils are on the clock to show Taylor Hall they’re serious
So here’s the question, the Devils’ rather stunning 5-4 overtime victory over Vegas on Friday in a game they trailed 3-0 before E-Z Pass could even register your toll charge, notwithstanding:
Is New Jersey showing enough to Taylor Hall that the NHL’s reigning Hart Trophy winner will sign an extension this summer and thus alleviate fears he will flee as a 2020 free agent?
Does Hall believe enough in the club’s future to eschew hitting the open market, where he’d be welcomed with offers from multiple contenders an elite piece away?
More to the point: Is there a team whose pajamas No. 9 wore to bed as a child?
Hall was part of the class of entry-level guys who signed long-term extensions following their respective second seasons in the league just prior to the 2012-13 Owners’ Lockout. Selected first overall by Edmonton in the Taylor/Tyler (Seguin) year of 2010, the winger locked himself in with a seven-year deal worth $6 million per.
That represented a pretty equitable exchange rate on one of those deals — impending 2019 free agents Jeff Skinner and Jordan Eberle signed similar extensions ahead of the lockout after their second seasons — that essentially eradicated the bridge nature of the second contract.
Particular deals aside (such as Hall’s) that made mutual sense and may have represented long-term saving for teams, awarding long-term lucrative contracts to players without arbitration rights destroyed clubs’ ability to maintain some sort of control over the cap.
You can argue all you want that money is now being allotted to the “correct” players, but MLB — the lone major sport to operate without a cap — does not feel the need to reward its great young stars who lack arbitration rights and whose contracts can be renewed.
NHL front offices had five years of contract control over a player and chose to forfeit it. Now clubs are being squeezed at pressure points that begin after an athlete’s second season. This is a large part of the reason that escrow has become an ugly issue again.
As we first reported on Monday via Twitter, the withholding rate for the season’s second quarter has increased from a first-quarter 11.5 percent to 13.5 percent. In a memo to certified agents perused by The Post, NHLPA executive director Don Fehr cites the league’s downward adjustment of projected revenue as the main contributing factor. Indeed, Fehr writes, “The current HRR [Hockey Related Revenue] projects a growth rate that would be, by far, the lowest annual growth rate under the current CBA.”
The union chief also names the currency exchange rate as a “significant factor” in the lower revenue projection. But there is this, too, from Fehr: “Player compensation is rising more than double the rate of projected HRR growth.”
That is largely because there is no second contract offset of third, arbitration-eligible deals and of free-agent contracts. That is the bed NHL front offices made and must now sleep in as this tsunami of talented teenagers enters the league.
But back to Hall and the Devils, for whom a second consecutive trip to the playoffs will be a mighty tall challenge. What does Ray Shero, who had a curiously mute summer, have to do in order to impress one of a handful of greatest players in franchise history not to have been part of a Cup-winner? In that category, by the way, Zach Parise is still the leader in the clubhouse.
Well, given the utter implosion of the post-injury Cory Schneider and the inconsistent work of Keith Kinkaid, the GM might want to get a goaltender. And as trading partners often reunite, the Devils might want to look again toward Edmonton and into pending free agent Cam Talbot as a rental property. Stabilizing the net would go a long way to kick-starting a playoff drive in which New Jersey would have to pass six teams … but really, we’re talking quantity, not quality, here.
And maybe Hall likes it here, and will like the eighth year of the contract that the Devils and only the Devils would be in position to offer this July. Maybe New Jersey makes an eight-year, $92 million offer ($11.5 million per) that the MVP would be foolish to reject. But maybe not. Maybe Hall, who has never won an NHL playoff round, wants more than the money. Maybe he wants to hook up long-term with a perennial contender.
The choice will be his. But Shero and the Devils had best get busy while there is still enough time to make a difference.
So now that there is a comparative goal explosion in the NHL, with games featuring a tick over six per for the first time since 2005-06 and the second time in 1995-96, where are the people who proclaimed over and over, “Goals don’t matter, scoring chances do?”
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So wait. While we expand the playoffs to include play-in rounds featuring conference ninth- and 10th-place teams (presumably in a mini-tournament with the seventh- and eighth-place clubs), what is everyone else supposed to do? Sit around for a week?
Playoff expansion is a terrible idea, worse even than the absurd bracket format. So when do we start?
Do this job long enough and you wind up tying things you’d never thought possible. Such as: Brian Burke was correct … when he went on TV the other day and decried the lack of hitting throughout the NHL, though I’d have omitted the word “violent” from the conversation.
It is true: it is one game after another of flag football.
This is under the math curriculum of the NHL: The Candy Canes of Carolina had won 13 of 31 games following Friday night, yet, can cry out that they are a .500 team. Detroit and Ottawa, winners of 14 of 33 games apiece? Why, they are somehow two games under .500. The Devils and perennially underachieving Puddy Tats of Sunrise, Fla.? Well, both with 11 victories in 30 games, both two games under! Same for the Canucks, winners of 14 of 34, and the Blues, winners of 12 of 30.
Funny, but if I’d turned that in on a math exam at PS 87 in Manhattan, I’d have been held back a grade.