Red Wings' Holland on Tatar's new 3-year deal: 'He's a very important player on our team'

After marinating for several seasons and tearing up the American Hockey League with the Grand Rapids Griffins, as all top-end Detroit Red Wings prospects seemingly do, Slovakian-born forward Tomas Tatar played a full season at the NHL level during the 2013-14 campaign. As he'd done in the minors, Tatar excelled.

The 22-year-old scored 19 goals and added 20 assists in 73 games last season, while logging bottom-six minutes and factoring in on Detroit's second power-play unit. In his limited role Tatar led the club in shot attempt differential (among Red Wings forwards who appeared in 50 games or more), and improved the Corsi For percentage of 12 of the 13 Red Wings skaters with whom he logged at least 100 even-strength minutes. 

Tatar showed the Red Wings enough in his first full season that they were willing to sign him to a new three-year, $8.25 million contract. Now that he's locked up for the medium-term, the Red Wings expect even more from him going forward.

"His best years are still ahead of him," Red Wings general manager Ken Holland told Chuck Pleiness of the Macomb Daily in a telephone interview this week. "He plays hard and goes to the hard areas. He’s a very important player on our team."

Holland also suggested that Tatar could see an increased role with the club next season:

He’s probably one of our top line forwards. We’d like to roll three lines out there that can score. That’s the way we’ve built our team for a lot of years.

We need to continue to get offense from a lot of our kids with (Tatar) being one of them.