Mike Chen's Hockey Blog
Entries with the tag: Contracts
Who Deserves 11-Year Contracts?
by Mike Chen on 04/11/09 at 03:27 PM ET
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Forgive me if I’m not jumping aboard the “Ken Holland is a genius” bandwagon. Check that—Ken Holland may have made plenty of genius moves in the past, but I’m not agreeing with the “Johan Franzen for 11 years is a genius move” sentiment.
Ok, so most of his moves are pretty sound. I’ll give him that. And getting players at reasonably low cap numbers is an impressive and good thing.
But seriously, aren’t at least some die-hard Wings fans out there a little unnerved by the length of Johan Franzen’s contract? I didn’t like the term of Henrik Zetterberg’s, but I think a guy like that is much more deserving of it—he’s a franchise player, versatile in every respect and a leader on the ice.
Franzen? There’s no questioning his ability to put the puck in the net, but is he a core guy on your team that you want to keep until he’s 40? There’s no way to predict things, but goal-scorer skills tend to decline pretty fast once you hit your mid-30s. Ask John Leclair about that; his whole game was based around putting the puck in the net from within a 15-foot radius around the crease, and in the end, he couldn’t have begged his way onto a team.
Filed in: NHL | Mike Chen's Hockey Blog | Permalink
Tags: Contracts, Johan+Franzen, John+Leclair,
