Joined: Jul. 2021
Posts: 821
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I need some help with something here. I’ve been judging this trade from Calgary’s perspective on the assumption that Tkachuk would have become a UFA next summer if they had kept him. However, I’m wondering if that’s true. He turned down his qualifying offer and the team filed for arbitration. I thought that if a player gets to an arbitration hearing, the arbitrator would award a one-year contract, but Cap Friendly’s arbitration calculator says, “Salary arbitration is a contract negotiation method that uses a third party arbitrator to determine a fair contract term and length for an expiring RFA player.” This implies that a player who goes to arbitration could get a multi-year contract. How does the arbitrator decide how long the contract will be? Could this have been a way for Calgary to have got more than one year out of Tkachuk? I think if they could have got at least two more years out of him, they might have been better off to keep him, because most of their other core players are signed for two years, so that seems to be their win window. This trade may have reduced that window to one year.
Another way for Calgary to get him for multiple years could have been not to request arbitration and hope that somebody signs him to an offer sheet, but if Tkachuk wanted out, I suspect he wouldn’t have signed an offer sheet knowing Calgary could match it. Obviously the trade worked out well for him, but he was lucky that the team was willing and able to make it happen. It seems to me that if he wanted to get out from under team control, his best bet would have been to accept his qualifying offer.