Assessing the Calgary Flames’ player re-signings under Brad Treliving

Over his nine years at the helm of the Calgary Flames, former general manager Brad Treliving had to hammer out new deals for a lot of prominent players. He developed a reputation as a tough negotiator, but one that seemed to do a fairly good job crafting deals that were fair for both sides and provided some decent value for the Flames.

Here’s a rundown of the trends and tendencies Treliving showed in re-signing players that Flames held the rights to.

Before we dive in, a minor distinction: we’re looking at restricted free agents and pending unrestricted free agents that re-upped with the Flames. For UFAs, we’re giving a two day buffer in terms of the opening of free agency – if a UFA re-signed with the Flames the day free agency opened, most of those contract talks occurred before he went to market, so we’re calling that a re-signing for these purposes.

Like our UFA look-back, we’re looking primarily at deals that committed $3 million or more.

Six players had their rights acquired by the Flames and Treliving (re-)signed them before they played a single game with the Flames:

Treliving signed 23 established Flames to new deals (worth $3+ million) as well. Most of them were straight-forward deals featuring no signing bonuses or added clauses. The “straight-forward” deals include new pacts for Mikael Backlund, Karri Ramo, Lance Bouma, Micheal Ferland, Sam Bennett (twice), Mark Jankowski, David Rittich, Andrew Mangiapane, Juuso Valimaki, Dillon Dube, Zadorov, Oliver Kylington and Dan Vladar.

Most of these deals are fairly unremarkable extensions. The most noteworthy was Bouma’s, which had the final year bought out. But the remainder of them were fairly run-of-the-mill market-rate extensions. (Ferland and Bennett were traded during the final year of their deals, while Valimaki was claimed by Arizona on waivers early in the final year of his.)

Nine other deals were handed out that involved bonuses, clauses, or both. Eight of them were to players you can easily argue were core players. One wasn’t.

The Giordano signing, the first major deal Treliving tackled as GM, essentially served as the team’s internal cap. At the time Giordano was the team’s captain and best player, and locking him into such a lengthy, team-friendly deal seem to impose a salary structure on the rest of the team. During Giordano’s time as a Flame, only Gaudreau ($6.75 million) and Tkachuk ($7 million) ever had a similar cap hit as the captain.

Treliving’s tendencies appeared to be bridging players on one, two or three-year deals until he figured out if they were core pieces, at which point he would go longer and also dangle signing bonuses and clauses to incentive these players to sign these lengthy deals.

In general he didn’t go too heavy on signing bonuses, though Huberdeau is a distinct outlier, with his $61.5 million in bonuses doubling what Treliving had handed out in re-signing deals to that point. Heck, Treliving gave out $56 million in signing bonuses to everybody else he signed to major deals as GM.

Treliving was similarly stingy with no-move clauses, preferring to hand out modified no-trade clauses instead, which gave players a bit of a safety net while maintaining the team’s flexibility in terms of moving players mid-contract.