Taking a look at Oliver Kylington contract comparables

The Calgary Flames are basically done their off-season to-do list. Well, mostly, as the Flames still have a pending restricted free agent left to sign: Swedish defenseman Oliver Kylington.

What’s taking so dang long with Kylington? Well, it probably stems from two things: the Flames minuscule cap space, and the odd mix of comparable players who have recently signed deals.

Kylington was a Flames’ second round pick, 60th overall, in the 2015 NHL Draft. Considering that weekend gave the Flames Andrew Mangiapane and Rasmus Andersson (and eventually Noah Hanifin and Elias Lindholm), it’s already a win. But Kylington’s coming along!

He’s 23. He’s a left shot defender who’s played five pro seasons in North America – plus parts of two more in Sweden – and with TJ Brodie off to Toronto he’s probably the best pure skater on the team. He’s played 87 NHL games and has 15 points – that’s about 0.172 points per game. He is an RFA with no arbitration rights, which basically means aside from withholding services or an offer sheet he has no leverage.

Here’s a quick rundown of some recent signings, sorted by NHL games played.

Now, we can probably agree that Dermott is probably the least comparable of the comparables: he’s played much more and scored much more, so at the least we can agree that Kylington shouldn’t get $874,000 for next season.

After that, it’s a bit messy.

One-way or two-way deal? Most of the players in this sample got one-way deals, but both Juulsen and Carlsson provide arguments for two-ways because they don’t have that much less experience than Kylington. (I’m a fan of the 1.5-way deal because it gives Kylington a bit of security with a multi-year pact, but does so by keeping the cap hit down a bit overall.)

From a pure production standpoint, Siegenthaler seems like the most similar player to Kylington. But $800,000 in a year when (a) Kylington’s probably the sixth or seventh blueliner and (b) the cap is flat is a bit of a hefty cap hit.

A compromise solution may be a one year deal at something around $750,000 – it’s a mid-point between Mete and Siegenthaler, albeit arbitrarily chosen – or perhaps just copying the Niku deal, as Kylington seems to be the Sami Niku of the Flames system.