Dallas Stars captain Jamie Benn is only one season away from hitting unrestricted free agency, that glorious time where a player gets to fully cash in his chips to fill his bank account after years of proving how good he is. And Jamie is going to get paid.
And he’s going to get paid by the Stars, barring something completely unforeseen. General Manager Jim Nill has already made that known. Benn has made it known that he wants to be here. All that’s left is to hammer out what a long term deal looks like for the NHL's 2014-'15 scoring leader and current Hart Trophy candidate.
My initial assumption was that market value for Benn looks like the Patrick Kane and Jonathan Toews contracts. Both signed eight-year extensions with the Chicago Blackhawks for 84 million dollars. These are the only contracts in the league with cap hits over ten million. I see no reason to think Benn couldn’t get that cash. He’s going to be better than Toews going forward, and likely a push with Kane.
What I decided to do was reach out to a few people to gauge popular opinion about what Benn is going to get. I decided against saying “I talked to industry sources” because it seemed both pretentious and insincere. All I really did was send a few Twitter DMs to smart hockey people to gauge their opinion. Fancy, eh?
So, here is how paid the ten person panel thinks Benn is about to be:
The average contract our panel of unnamed hockey-people decided upon gives Jamie 9.2 million dollars over 7.5 years, rounded up to eight to model reality. Most of our participants picked seven or eight years, with one holdout saying six. Our lowest salary prediction was eight with a couple people going to ten.
This is going to be a big contract, and this unscientific experiment yielded about what I would have expected for results. I’m assuming that the only way he isn’t going to get eight years is if he prefers a shorter contract to potentially maximize his money so my prediction is going to be in line with the panel: nine million per year for eight years -$ 72 million in total.
A wild card is hanging over the contract that can’t really be ignored. These giant contracts loom large over every roster in the NHL. You simply can’t make a mistake with a megadeal like this and remain meaningfully competitive for long without convincing a poorly-run team to bail you out. I don’t think Benn carries much risk to become a mistake, but teams always try to minimize risk. It isn’t out of the question to think the contract could come in under what we would otherwise expect.
Money is beautiful and I have zero problems with any player pursuing as much cash as a team is willing to hand them. I hope Benn gets stupid money. He’s incredible. We’ve also seen how much fire this guy has and how badly he wants to win. We also know what a good negotiator Nill has shown himself to be. I don’t expect it, but I wouldn’t be stunned if Benn left a little money on the table to help the Stars maintain flexibility to go after a Stanley Cup.
We should know something over the next month. Contract extensions can be signed when free agency begins, but we theoretically could hear about an agreement at any point before then. It makes some sense for Benn to wait for Steven Stamkos to sign his new deal when free agency opens, but how much of a difference will it really make? Benn is a superstar in this league of the highest order. He’s going to get paid no matter what. Now we just wait and see how much that ends up being.
You can marvel about Jamie Benn with Josh Lile on Twitter at @JoshL1220
