Minnesota Wild Making a Smart Bet with Charlie Coyle's Contract Extension

On Thursday, the Minnesota Wild signed promising young forward Charlie Coyle to a five-year contract extension. The deal, which will kick in next season when his entry-level contract expires, is worth a shade over $3 million per season:

This isn’t a landmark deal, but it is the latest example of a team making a choice between a short-term bridge deal and a longer-term potential-driven accord on a player’s second contract.

The second contract question is one that’s been around for a long time. An entry-level cap is a staple of the NHL system, but once that first deal ends technically the player is a restricted free agent like any other.

Some teams have opted to use their superior bargaining power—a player coming out of his entry-level deal lacks arbitration rights and is years away from unrestricted free agency—to force a cheap, short-term deal. Other teams have instead traded money for term, giving a player with upside a deal that pays him a little more now in exchange for a low cap hit in later years when he’ll presumably be worth significantly more.

While there are strong opinions out there on the subject, the truth is that there is no one-size-fits-all approach. A short-term, dirt-cheap contract is a choice that makes sense in some circumstances.

If the team is a contender pressed hard against the salary cap, it’s hard to blame that club’s management for placing a priority on getting cheap production even at long-term cost. If there is reason to be skeptical of the player’s abilities, it’s equally sensible to avoid giving him a long-term contract and a suitcase full of cash.

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With that said, a so-called “bridge” deal isn’t the only right way to proceed. On a team with enough cap space to absorb the contract, a long-term second contract can be a way to get a top-flight player locked up at reasonable dollars.

John Tavares, for example, will play this season and three more at a $5.5 million cap hit for the New York Islanders because he signed a long-term extension that kicked in when his entry-level deal ended in the summer of 2012. In contrast, Montreal forced P.K. Subban into a low-dollars bridge deal when his first contract expired that same summer. His new deal pays him $9 million per season. It’s not hard to identify the team getting superior value there.

Where does Coyle fit into this discussion? The answer to that question hinges on both his team’s cap situation and his upside as an NHL player.

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On the cap-space question, Minnesota is ideally situated to take money on today in an effort to keep cap hits low tomorrow. Even including Coyle’s new deal and even assuming the NHL salary cap doesn’t rise by a penny, CapGeek.com has the Wild with more than $12.4 million in cap space open for next season. With that kind of room, they can afford to have Coyle take up a little more space now, just as they could afford to give another player in a similar spot (Jonas Brodin) a long-term deal that kicks in at the same time.

In theory, these are the kinds of moves a team coming into its own should absolutely make. Once the team starts having success, it’s a lot easier to keep the core together if most of it is young and signed for a long time at a cheap price.

That still leaves the practical consideration of exactly how much money a player like Coyle is worth.

Coyle hasn’t been a big scorer over his brief professional career, and there is at least some reason to question how much offensive upside he has. He was a 30-point player for the Wild in 2013-14, he had only 25 points in 47 AHL games in 2012-13 and he was well below the point-per-game pace over two seasons of college play.

It’s not a question of circumstance either—Coyle got an offensive zone push in 2013-14 but scored a middling 1.45 points per hour at even strength; he also had regular duty on the power play and managed all of three points over an entire season.

However, points don’t do a great job of capturing Coyle’s complete game. The 6’3”, 221-pound pivot/right wing has posted strong Corsi numbers over his NHL career according to HockeyAnalysis.com, and even going back to draft day he was pegged as a player with real strengths without the puck.

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“He’s a very hard-working guy,” an NHL scout told The Hockey News magazine for their 2010 Draft Preview. “I see him as a two-way player. He’s a strong kid who has really good size, but in the games I saw him, I didn’t see him as a top-six player. I saw him as more of a third-line guy.”

There were some echoes of what that scout said in Wild assistant general manager Brent Flahr’s comments to the Star Tribune’s Michael Russo after the deal was announced:

"

If he just does what he’s doing right now, he’s still a big, valuable piece of our team. You see the trust he has with the coaching staff. Everybody wants to play with Charlie Coyle on a lot of occasions just because of his size and the way he plays his all-around game.

We think he’s just emerging. It’s just the tip of the iceberg with the guy right now. You see how hard he works, the time he puts into the game. He’s the type of player you win with. For him, we had no issues going term with him.

"

If Coyle’s offensive game doesn’t come, Minnesota did OK here. The structure of the deal (Coyle averages $2.25 million per season over the first two years, then $3.83 million over the last three, one of which is a season in which he’d be eligible for unrestricted free agency) is basically a combination of a bridge contract and what one would normally see a mid-tier forward approaching his UFA years land.

In this scenario, the Wild benefit mostly from having some of the cap hit count in 2014-15, when the team knows it’s going to have room for it.

But they’re also covered if Coyle evolves as an offensive weapon. He’s only 22 years old, he has a lot of tools in his favour and there have been flashes of scoring ability along the way. If he’s even a 40-point guy while playing a responsible two-way game and injecting size in to the lineup, Minnesota is going to be very happy with this contract.  

Jonathan Willis covers the NHL for Bleacher Report. Follow him on Twitter for more of his work. Statistics via behindthenet.ca, war-on-ice.com and NHL.com. Salary information via CapGeek.com.