The offseason is here but the news keeps on rolling in, folks! The Flyers have been busy since the end of the season, and after alluding to wanting to do so in their end of season media availabilities, it looks like the Flyers have gotten the work done to extend Ivan Fedotov for the next two seasons, as was first reported by Anthony Di Marco and Darren Dreger, and made official by the team this afternoon. The contract will carry him through the next two seasons, and has an average annual value of $3.25 million.
And that is… a lot of money, to be sure. But let’s unpack the situation a bit. On the one hand, the negotiations for this contract — despite it being his first extension after his entry-level deal expired — were a little more complicated, as due to his age, he was set to become a UFA this summer, and that tends to drive the price up, across the board. Additionally, a generous read on the situation would have us know that this is likely also a bit of goodwill offered by the team, given all that Fedotov has been through these last few years (and the income that he surely lost).
Our pal Charlie also offers up another wrinkle to the situation, which is to say, for as difficult as his time over in Russia was, it was still no small ask or decision for him to come over to North America in the first place. Players are highly incentivized to stay over there, and it was going to take the promise — even in a sort of handshake capacity — of a lucrative extension on the other side of that move in order to convince him to make that jump across the pond. In some ways, we understand that this may well be just the cost of doing business with a player who had gotten himself well established in the KHL by that point.
All in all, it’s a high contract, but combined with Sam Ersson’s cap hit over the next two seasons (these contracts line up with each other perfectly time-wise, we should add), the Flyers are still only spending $4.7 million on their goaltending tandem, which is a pretty good deal on any team, much less one that is still rebuilding and not overly fussed about maximizing their cap space. We’ll see how things play out in terms of Fedotov’s level of play to match that dollar figure, but the work done here certainly could be worse.
