Friedman Provides Dougie Hamilton Contract Details
By Ryan Pike
8 years agoWith the NHL Draft in the rear-view mirror, Sportsnet’s Elliotte Friedman’s 30 Thoughts provided its usual blend of insight and intrigue. Most relevant in Calgary Flames circles? The circumstances of Dougie Hamilton’s exit from Beantown, apparently related to his contract desires.
I’m more curious about practical analysis, as in, what does this tell us about the new regime? One GM compared it to “Harry Sinden running the team again.” What he meant was Hamilton and Milan Lucic made contract asks the Bruins didn’t like, and rather than doing much negotiating, pulled the trigger.To be fair, Don Sweeney was up against a July 1 offer sheet possibility, although not with Lucic.The best information I can give you is it appears the team offered six years and $33M to Hamilton, while the response was about $2M per year higher.Sometimes, we get caught up in initial proposals. Any good negotiator will tell you to exaggerate your opening position.
Time for some math: $33 million over six years is a $5.5 million average annual value (AAV), which is the figure we’d heard bandied about as the number that could get a deal done. Whoops. This also means that the Hamilton camp’s counter-offer was likely around $7.5 million. A “meet in the middle” strategy would probably end up around $6.5 million, though if the Flames want him to go long-term and give up some years of unrestricted free agency, that number may creep up a bit.
Hamilton’s 22 and would become an unrestricted free agent in five seasons, so anything beyond that would involve some give-and-take between Hamilton’s camp and the Flames.
But in the grand scheme of things, a cap hit between $6.5 million and $7.5 million for a defenseman of his caliber doesn’t seem like a big stretch, or a big overpayment. (The bigger question may be what it means for the Mark Giordano negotiations, but that’s a whole other kettle of fish.)
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