Sabres should bite the bullet and pay Eichel $10M per season
It's time to pay Jack Eichel what he's worth.
The Buffalo Sabres sniper's camp has reportedly been negotiating an eight-year contract extension for weeks, but the two sides appear hung up on the dollar amount.
Eichel, who has one more season left on his entry-level deal, is rumored to be seeking $10 million annually on a potential extension, but the club is believed to be reluctant to go that high, according to The Buffalo News' Mike Harrington.
The 20-year-old forward led Buffalo with 57 points and ranked second on the Sabres with 24 goals despite missing 21 games due to injury.
He finished 11th in the NHL among qualified players with 0.9344 points per game, just barely missing out on a $2-million bonus for ending up in the top 10, because Leon Draisaitl of the Edmonton Oilers wrapped up the regular season at 0.939.
Eichel matched the goal total he posted in his rookie season and exceeded his point total from that 2015-16 campaign by one despite being limited to 20 fewer games.
That he was able to improve his rate of point production by more than 33 percent in an injury-plagued campaign provides quantitative evidence of his year-to-year improvement, and it's hard to imagine he'll regress considering the tools he possesses that justified his selection as the second overall pick behind Connor McDavid in 2015.
Eichel's negotiations have no doubt been influenced by McDavid's eight-year, $100-million extension and the eight-year, $68-million deal Draisaitl agreed to earlier this week. He doesn't deserve the $12.5 million McDavid will earn annually, but it makes sense to pay Eichel a number that slots in somewhere between the two Oilers stars.
The fact that Draisaitl agreed to take a team-friendly $8.5 million per campaign could work against Eichel in his contract talks considering their comparable point production, but it shouldn't.
Draisaitl collected many of those points while playing with McDavid, who won the Art Ross Trophy with 100 points in the regular season and took home the Hart Trophy as the league's MVP.
Giving Eichel upwards of $10 million per year would put him in rarefied air. A $10.5-million annual amount would match what the Chicago Blackhawks are paying Patrick Kane and Jonathan Toews against the cap on their respective deals, and it would exceed Alex Ovechkin's cap hit.
But those contracts were signed years ago, the market has evolved since then, and Eichel is a star in the making whose name will soon be mentioned among the very best active players in the game if he continues to improve.
He has less than two full seasons under his belt at the NHL level, but neither his injury nor his relative inexperience should prevent him from truly cashing in.
It's understandable that the Sabres would be hesitant about giving Eichel $10 million every season until 2026, but we're at the point now where the two sides could be as close as $1 million apart on the annual figure, and they could be even closer.
While there's no huge rush to get a deal done, both sides would clearly like to avoid having talks stretch into the fall.
Is it really worth creating a potential in-season distraction when you're as close as you appear to be to locking up your franchise player for the majority of his prime years?
If the Sabres are indeed concerned about paying Eichel double digits on a per-season basis, they should get creative with the year-by-year breakdown and front-load it to give themselves flexibility in the future.
An extra million dollars per season won't do much to hamper their cap situation in the grand scheme of things, anyway, and conceding would create some added goodwill between the franchise and Eichel after a season full of reported frustration for the budding superstar.
The Sabres should offer him an eight-year, $80-million extension and shouldn't hesitate to do it any longer.
(Photos courtesy: Getty Images)