Boy, have we come a long way since the night of the Claude Giroux trade.
Sportsnet’s Elliotte Friedman reported this Friday morning that the Flyers and winger Owen Tippett are on the verge of agreeing on an eight-year contract extension. As of this writing, the exact amount of the deal is unknown, but Friedman says the annual value is expected to be between $6-6.5 million, making the total of the deal somewhere in the $48-52 million range. Per The Fourth Period’s Anthony DiMarco, the exact average annual value of the deal is $6.2 million, making it a $49.6 million contract in total.
Tippett, who came to Philadelphia as something of a castoff but also as the main piece in the return for franchise legend Claude Giroux in March of 2022, has emerged as one of the best players on the Flyers in the two years he’s spent here under John Tortorella. He’s lived up to his billing as a volume shooter who can create chances for himself, and after scoring 27 goals last year, he’s playing at a 32-goals-per-82 pace this year.
With no significant red flags in his profile in terms of shooting percentage or performance above expectation, it feels increasingly safe to project that this is who Owen Tippett is: a guy you can put in your top-6 and expect to put up 25 to 30 goals in a season if he stays healthy. That’s a valuable guy to have around, and it’s easy to see why Danny Briere and the front office moved to keep him around.
Tippett would have been a restricted free agent with arbitration rights this summer, and had two more restricted years before he was set to reach unrestricted free agency. Giving him an eight-year deal that begins while he’s 25 years old eats up those two years and also gets him under contract for what figures to be the rest of his prime, all while not reaching too far into what will likely be his decline from said prime. As far as the dollar amount, a $6.2 million AAV certainly feels reasonable for the prime years of a guy who’s cemented himself as a second-line winger at worst, especially considering that after a few years of COVID-related stagnancy the salary cap is likely going to start increasing at more normal rates in the near future.
We’ll have more insight on this deal and what it means for Tippett and the Flyers in the near future, but the initial read here is that this is a nice bit of business for the Flyers to make sure a guy that looks like a legitimate future piece is going to be here long-term.
