When the Rangers acquired two time Cup champ Barclay Goodrow from the Tampa Bay Lightning for a seventh round pick on Saturday, you could imagine it was going to be a big contract. Well we now have a little more detail on just how big.
It appears that the deal will indeed be in the six year range, with an Average Annual Value (AAV) of around $3.6M, quite the payday for the 28 year old soon to be UFA.
We’ll have to wait until Thursday at least to find out for sure, and there’s still the slight possibility Seattle could outbid the Rangers during their exclusive negotiating period which is active now, but if it is indeed this big, then the Rangers will have a significant commitment to a bottom six forward through much of the remainder of his NHL career.
One thing the Rangers can do is frontload the contract a little, but they would have to keep within the NHL’s variance between highest and lowest years – lowest year needs to be at least 60% of the highest year, and you can’t drop or raise more than 25% in adjacent years, meaning the lowest they could go in the out years is probably around $2.61M. Even at that range, that’s a significant cost on a guy who might or might not be still productive at age 33/34.
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