The Flyers have signed defenseman Andrew MacDonald to a six-year contract extension, the team announced this morning. According to the Courier Post, the contract terms are …. well, not great:
MacDonald’s deal is six years $30 million.
— Dave Isaac (@davegisaac) April 15, 2014
That’s a salary cap hit of $5 million per year. The salary cap is going up this summer, but yikes.
We wrote last month about MacDonald’s contract negotiations, his role in Philly vs. with the Islanders and what we should have expected him to earn on his new deal. We pegged it at five years, $4.25 million per year, and we basically called that an overpayment.
This is not a good contract, and that’s despite the fact that MacDonald has been very good in the defensive zone. Kevin Christmann got into that with a well-timed story this morning. Here’s a piece of it:
This helps to explain the glaring discrepancy between MacDonald’s piss-poor possession numbers versus what I, and most everyone else, see in the defensive zone where he appears to be quite good. While he may be good in his own end, it appears as if he struggles mightily in the neutral zone, allowing his opponents to gain the zone with possession far too often. So he ends up spending a lot more time facing shot attempts in his own end.
Whether you like what you’ve seen from MacDonald or not, he now has a similar contract to guys like Paul Martin, Alex Edler, Keith Yandle, Niklas Kronwall, Jay Bouwmeester, James Wisniewski or a number of other guys who are better hockey players than him.
Many are saying that this was his market value and that somebody would have paid him this as a UFA this summer, so the Flyers had to do it to keep him. Sure, I guess. They also have the choice to not overpay just because another team might be dumb.
