It’s been a terrific first year on the job for Carolina Hurricanes GM Eric Tulsky.

In taking over for Don Waddell this past summer, Tulsky completed his journey from hockey outsider to head of an NHL franchise. Tulsky earned a PhD in chemistry and worked for a decade in the field of nanotechnology before starting to blog about hockey analytics, and then slowly made the climb from consulting jobs to analytics roles to managerial duties. Now, he’s a general manager – and one who, given his background, already has a reputation for outside-the-box thinking.

In other words, leave it to Tulsky to set new contractual precedents – the kind that the rest of the league will no doubt be replicating shortly.

This week, Tulsky’s Hurricanes eliminated the New Jersey Devils, moving on to the second round, where they will face the Washington Capitals. But Tulsky’s business wasn’t exclusively conducted on the ice.

He also signed Taylor Hall – acquired earlier in the season as part of the trade that briefly brought Mikko Rantanen to Carolina – to a three-year contract extension. And not just any contract extension!

We imagine that negotiations went something like this:

Hall decided he wanted to stick around in Carolina, and Carolina decided they wanted to keep him in the fold for the foreseeable future…but not at his current price tag of a $6 million cap hit. They had to ask him to take a pay cut.

Hall is coming off a regular season of 18 goals and 42 points in 77 games split between Chicago and Carolina. That’s not worth $6 million, but it’s probably worth more than the $3,166,667 that the Hurricanes and Hall’s camp finally settled on.

So, how did they get him down to that amount?

By offering some security. Hall has bounced around the league since leaving the Edmonton Oilers, and the Hurricanes are his seventh NHL home. That’s a lot of moving for anyone, and especially someone at Hall’s current age of 33. In exchange for taking a nearly 50% pay cut, Hall gets three years of term…and a no-movement clause, to help ensure he stays in one place.

Now, this is nothing new. NMCs and NTCs get handed out like free air fresheners these days, and can feel almost automatic on most major deals. But they also carry a decent amount of risk, especially when they’re attached to an obviously depreciating asset like Hall. His production has steadily declined over the years, and injuries have piled up, resulting in him playing just 10 total games last year. Tulsky and the Hurricanes were thus okay giving Hall that extra security via a no-movement clause…so long as they could take out a little extra insurance.

And here’s where we get to the unprecedented part. Hall’s contract includes a condition through which his NMC becomes a limited, 10-team NTC for Year 3 if, and only if, Hall scores fewer than 35 points in Year 2 of the deal.

That’s it. It’s the kind of thing that it’s hard to believe hasn’t happened before. Most would assume that the reason NTCs and NMCs haven’t been made conditional before is because they couldn’t be. But apparently not! Apparently, we just needed a GM willing to think outside the box enough to devise this solution. And, of course, a player willing to sign on to it.

Performance bonuses, it must be said, are typically only available on entry-level contracts and those signed by players over the age of 35. But this isn’t technically a performance bonus. It’s a conditional clause attached to performance, and for whatever reason, it’s allowed.

Hall gets plenty of the deal. Job security, a consistent home, and maybe even a little extra motivation to produce. But the Hurricanes get more, in the form of safety and maneuverability.

That’s why Tulsky might have been the first GM to ink an extension like this, but he won’t be the last.

We’ve probably gone far enough in a CanucksArmy article at this point without mentioning the Vancouver Canucks. But they and GM Patrik Allvin could very well begin using this new tactic – or attempting to, anyway – in several of their upcoming rounds of contract negotiations.

To be honest, we don’t know if it will come up this summer. Pius Suter is going to be a hot commodity on the UFA centre market; one who probably won’t have to compromise on his contractual terms. Derek Forbort will likely receive a short-term extension, if anything, and is unlikely to secure trade protection.

But maybe it could come into play if Brock Boeser does indeed circle back to the Canucks after not receiving the offers he’s looking for on the open market, something that Allvin and Jim Rutherford have left on the table as a possibility. In that case, Boeser could be looking for some added security via protection clauses, and the Canucks could point to his injury history and other factors as justification to give him the ‘Hall Special’ – a NTC or NMC attached to performance-based clauses.

But we think the tactic is most likely to be employed by the Canucks in contract negotiations a little further into the future – specifically, those conducted with goaltender Thatcher Demko, who is set to become a UFA after next season.

Few goalies have suffered the multitude of injuries and illnesses experienced by Demko over the last couple of seasons. It makes him a really interesting asset to evaluate. On the one hand, he’s literally a season removed from being nominated for the Vezina Trophy. On the other hand, he’s got popliteus issues and a dozen other potential maladies besides, and none can truly say with any certainty whether he’ll ever truly return to form.

In other words, he might be the perfect candidate for this new kind of contract. By the rights of his ability, Demko is a player who has the right to negotiate for a protection clause. But the nature of his injuries and the likelihood of them continuing to affect his performance make any such clause risky.

Attaching the continuation of a NMC on a performance threshold, probably just ‘games played’ in Demko’s situation, might be the ideal middle ground for the two sides to agree upon. It offers the player some protection. And it offers the team insurance and flexibility, to a point. It’s a compromise, but good deals are built on compromise.

Ultimately, it is impossible to predict when and how this tactic will emerge in Vancouver circles. However, it will eventually, provided the league doesn’t intervene to ban this practice first. Tulsky appears to have given his fellow GMs an entirely new negotiating tool for their managerial toolbelts, and that’s interesting in and of itself, and because of its potential relevance to the Canucks.