Quoting: justaBoss
Honestly if all of the contracts follow your logic, the maximum term on every deal would be 3 years because of the possibility of a player not being that good in the future.
Sadly, that's not how anything works. The UFA player's market value depends on two things:
1) buyers needs - if a team needs a player such as Krug, it's likely the team would offer more than others.
2) players past performance - because no one can predict how well players will perform in future, the only factual basis for making an offer is the players past production.
Teams have the option of giving a lot of money short term for a player they might be after, or they could offer him a tad less with him more term. At 29, assuming a 7-year contract is still somewhat reasonable. Especially when the market for the players of his caliber is pretty scarce.
This is such bad logic. Most guys hit FA at 27. You give then 7 years and ok, they are 34. Maybe you get 1 bad year out of it and can justify having very solid years out a guy.
But that is not the case here.
And Krug is not the only person I have said this on, and frankly a lot of people agree with the thought. Giving a 31 year old Dadonov a 7 year deal is not a wise choice either.
You have to be wise about what you are doing and honest about contract lengths vs returns. Dadonov isn't going to play well till he's 37. At 31, you might get 3 good years out of him.
But if he was 27, you could say, ok, there are probably 5-6 good years there and if you are lucky you get 7. So you take the 5-6 and it's the cost of the 1.
But when you are looking at him at 31, it's like, wow Maybe we get 3 good years out of him and then the other 4 are suspect as hell. Not a smart choice.
Furthermore, you can look at guys who benefit form being in a good spot and realize they aren't worth the money. Connor Sheary is a great example of that. What an epic waste of 3 million that contract was. He was carried. You can look at a lot of guys and say that. Situation matters.
So yes, you can make logical predictive choices. You just have to stop looking at it as, that player plays for my team...or I like him so I think he should get paid.
Teams are learning more and more that it's harder to deal with the cap. Especially as younger players are pushing for money earlier. That switch and the league getting younger has caused teams to really start working the cap fundamentally differently.
Which means no more signing guys till they are 36-37 and teams being much more calculative on worth vs expected return.
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