5 Things: Projecting Brandon Sutter’s next contract

So yeah, we all know by now that the Canucks dramatically overpaid for Brandon Sutter. In that they gave away a player who is better than him, and only 10 months older, plus a decent defensive prospect, plus a second-round pick.

The reason why they did this is obvious: Jim Benning significantly overrates Sutter’s quality for unknown (or perhaps unknowable) reasons. We have plenty of evidence to suggest that Sutter is both currently overpaid and wildly overrated. His 2014-15 career year compares pretty closely with that of Eric Nystrom’s age-26 season back in 2009-10. And let’s put it simply: When your best season ever is statistically comparable to Eric Nystrom’s second-best season ever (shout out to 2011-12), that is concerning as a baseline.

Not to say that Sutter is without value, because he is good at certain things. Those things are not “helping his team” in a lot of ways, but if you’re relying on him as your fourth-line center, there are worse options out there. Most are cheaper than that $3.3 million price tag, of course, but you’ll find it tough to argue with Hockey People on a guy scores 15-20 goals a year and provides the illusion of solid defense.

That’s a Two-Way Player if ever there was one, and no one is saying 15-20 goals isn’t valuable, but the question for Vancouver very quickly becomes what the overall cost is going to be.

The fact of the matter is that Benning has already invested significantly in this player without figuring in the extension that he’s going to get in the next few days. Three assets is a lot to give up for one player, regardless of how good that player is, and Sutter isn’t worth the combined value of those three assets (or indeed, Bonino, the most important of those three [or indeed, probably the combined value of the other two]).

So, okay, you make the acquisition with the intention of re-signing him, obviously. You definitely want to lock down 26-year-old borderline third/fourth centers for as long as possible, and if you have to give up the assets to get one, that’s just the cost of doing business.

But then Benning, because this is who he is and how he functions in his job, effectively walked into the car dealership, looked at a Ford Focus, and said as loudly as possible to the nearest salesperson, “Well, this car reminds me a lot of a Bentley.”

At this, the salesperson said, “Well heck if he already sold his old car which was pretty good, and some other stuff to lease this car, he’ll pay whatever I want to own it long-term.”

In this case the salesperson is Sutter’s agent, who is going to make a pretty good amount of money on this deal himself, because Benning has a stunning combination of lack of restraint and inability to understand the actual value of hockey players.

So we have to assume first and foremost that Sutter is probably looking at a decent-sized raise from his current $3.3 million, which is already an overpayment.

It must first be said that I’m not expecting much movement in the salary cap, nor should anyone else even if there will be one more outdoor game this season than there were last year. (The Winter Classic in Foxboro plus two Stadium Series games in Minneapolis and Denver carry a combined approximate capacity of about 172,000, compared with the combined 122,000 for last year’s two outdoor games.) But that hasn’t stopped teams from fervently believing in the “the cap will go up” mythologizing that goes on every year. It might go up thanks to another NHLPA escalator, but the days of 7-plus percent increases are over, and we all have to get used to it.

And with that having been said, you don’t call someone a foundational player and then give them a
modest bump in pay. You extend him long-term and for big money. Which
makes this contract borderline impossible to predict in a lot of ways.
There are simply no reasonable comparables for Sutter once you get up to
the $4.5 million range or so. I can’t see him making less than that
based on Benning’s comments and what the Canucks have committed to other
players starting in 2016 (when Sutter’s new contract would go into
effect).

Is that a crazy amount of money to give Brandon Sutter? You bet it is. But the Canucks are giving a crazy amount of money to so many people at this point that it’s difficult to say with any authority that they can be trusted to approach things sanely here.

When you get into that $4.5 million range, there aren’t a lot of guys there to begin with. Only 16 active centers make between $4-5 million against the cap, and a lot of them are guys on contracts that were universally acknowledged as insane.

RJ Umberger at $4.6 million! Vinny Lecavalier and Brooks Laich at $4.5 million! Tyler Bozak at $4.2 million! And so on. And actually, now that we arrive there, I don’t actually think Bozak is too bad of a comparable for Sutter here. (All stats coming up via War On Ice, obviously).

Obviously it appears as though Bozak, who himself is weirdly seen as a good two-way center with offensive capabilities despite mountains of evidence to the contrary, outperforms Sutter in a number of ways. More assists and points per 60, with better relative numbers. The one leads to the other in some ways, obviously, but so too does “playing with Phil Kessel,” which is a luxury Sutter never had. Indeed, the number of 5-on-5 minutes he’s played with either Sid Crosby or Evgeni Malkin is less than 250 over the last three seasons. Not a lot at all, so no major impact on his scoring numbers. Meanwhile, Bozak is basically attached at the hip to Kessel for his entire pre-peak run (about 80 percent of his 5-on-5 minutes).

But on the other hand, Sutter’s relative numbers are going to look worse because he can’t compare with Crosby and Malkin (goalscoring, chance-creating, possession-dominating juggernauts who drag the team’s average up sharply), meaning that while he gets tougher zone starts, and Bozak faced tougher competition, their ability to keep opponents out of their own zone is probably very similar, all things considered.

Again, Bozak is sitting on a contract that pays him an AAV of $4.2 million for five years, which went into effect into his age-27 season, back in 2013-14. That was 6.5 percent of the salary cap back then, and its modern-day equivalent is about $4.66 million (about 3.6 percent off from the $4.5 million where I initially pegged him).

So are we looking at a scenario in which we see Benning give Sutter something like $4.6 million for five years? That sounds just about right, doesn’t it? Doesn’t sound good, mind you, but it does sound right.

Unwise contracts are par for the course in Vancouver these days, and there’s no reason this should be any different.