Tuesday: The deal is official, Hornqvist will be under contract through the 2022-23 season.
Monday: While meeting with media to discuss his team’s trade deadline, Pittsburgh Penguins’ GM Jim Rutherford revealed another detail that will make a lot of fans happy. The team is closing in on a contract extension with pending unrestricted free agent Patric Hornqvist. He believes the deal will be finalized tomorrow. According to several reports including Bob McKenzie of TSN, the deal is expected to be for five years, with an average annual value of $5.3MM.
Hornqvist has been a major contributor to the Penguins success over the last few years, since coming over from the Nashville Predators for James Neal back in 2014. Although he is 31, Hornqvist has cracked 50 points in three of his last four seasons and shows no signs of slowing down. A dominant net front presence who has shown great chemistry with Pittsburgh’s superstar forwards, Hornqvist’s extension may look excessive to some, but is a good fit for Pittsburgh for now.
Hornqvist in having a bit of a down season, but he has always shown up in a major way for the Penguins come postseason time. The security of a new deal may be exactly what Hornqvist’s needs to get back on track down the stretch and ready to help Pittsburgh battle for a third straight Stanley Cup title.
Could be the best trade deadline news we could ask for
What TJECK said. Can’t wait till it is official!
Same here
What’s Pittsburgh cap situation look like the next few years? Can’t imagine they’ll have a lot of space to work with going forward.
I know the cap is supposed to jump next year by more than it had been but can’t remember what the early projections are supposed to be. At least with several guys under contract, they can try to trade some of them during the offseason coming up if it does get tight next season. You are right with the cap space with guys like Malkin and Crosby coming due again soon too.
Crosby will still be here for a while. Malkin’s deal will be up in about 2 or 3 years. If they were to deal anyone during the offseason, it wouldn’t surprise me if it was one of the younger forwards, like Sheary, Rust or even Guentzel. Those guys are cost controlled too & would fetch a really good return.
The tough part with trading those younger guys is that some teams will hesitate since a lot of their production has been tied to playing alongside one of Malkin or Crosby (Rust in particular has seemed to play very well alongside one of those two, but performs like a 4th liner when he isn’t alongside them). Also, it’ll be hard to nail down a great trade since the Penguins would have to find a balance between getting a quality player to replace them and getting a potential young player that could replace them in a couple of years. It’ll essentially be a Blackhawks-esque rebuild. The big difference should be that Pittsburgh hasn’t seemingly given out any contracts that look like an albatross waiting to happen unless Hornqvist falls off a cliff in terms of production. But in a year or two, they’ll likely have to move Kessel and one of Letang, Domoulin, or Maata unless the plan is to keep plugging super cheap and inexperienced wingers alongside Crosby and Malkin.
When Ray Shero was first hired and locked up his big 3 centers, MAF and a core of D men, I assumed his plan was to keep drafting winger and winger to plug in cheap young players year after year given the cap expenses at all of the other spots.
Then he kept drafting D men every single year.
Wingers are the least valuable and most easily replaceable players. No reason not to keep a core of Sid, Geno, Letang, Kessel and Murray (and evidently Hornqvist) and fill in with cheap wingers.
Oh I totally agree that wingers are the most easily replaceable players. Part of the problem becomes finding players that mesh well with Crosby and Malkin. Now the skill of those two makes it a lot easier but it will eventually create problems if/when both of them start to slow down and need a little more help from the wingers. That’s essentially what happened to Chicago. As Toews slowed down (granted he doesn’t have the offensive profile of Crosby and has always been a more defensive-minded center) the Blackhawks have had troubles finding wingers who can pick up the slack and still mesh well with Toews.
After this season,
Malkin has 4 years left on his contract @ at $9.5MM and Crosby 7 yrs @ $8.7MM. Either way, plenty tied up and just have to hope the cap increases enough to keep it going.
They were projected to have 16 players locked into next year leaving them with 16 mil in cap room prior to signing Hornqvist. They will have a few RFA that will eat into the rest. But I could see someone like Sheary being packaged for a defenseman in the offseason.