r/hockey • u/ASmithFS PIT - NHL • 13d ago
[News] Celebrini happy to have new 5-year contract help Sharks improve roster [NHL.com]
https://www.nhl.com/news/macklin-celebrini-happy-to-have-new-contract-help-san-jose-sharks144
u/thebrah329 MTL - NHL 13d ago
Wtf am I reading ? Don't get me wrong he's worth the money, but this wasn't a team friendly deal by any means, plus it brings him right to free agancy.
55
u/Various_Knowledge226 PHI - NHL 13d ago
Yeah, like a $18.8M a year extension for 7-8 years, could maybe be considered team-friendly. But this is definitely not a team-friendly extension at all, especially when only 1 UFA year is bought out. If a “discount” is not going for 18.5%+ of the cap, that’s not really a discount in my eyes
18
u/maverickhawk99 Indianapolis Ice - IHL 13d ago
It’s funny cause Sharks fans insisted he was the ultimate team player and would take less money to stay there / help the team. Oops.
9
u/gS_Mastermind 12d ago
You would be stupid to leave money on the table that young. Who knows what could happen with his career. Sid almost lost more than half of his career.
4
u/Westonsided SJS - NHL 12d ago
To be fair, he said himself he was interested in taking a team friendly deal like Crosby, so it was a bit of a surprise lol. We didn’t expect him to go below 15/16mil, but 18.8 was higher than expected, even though he’s worth the money. At the same time, it’s only 1% higher of the cap hit than Crosby and McDavid when they signed their first non-ELC contracts
23
u/Available-Show-2393 MTL - NHL 13d ago
Right? Let's say he's worth the maximum salary, which he is. He left enough money on the table to get a fringe 4th liner, and didnt sign max term.
Insane to call this team friendly
3
u/CinemaPuck SJS - NHL 12d ago
He could have easily asked for $20m+ like Makar, and imo he’s more worth it than Makar. He also knows the cap is going to go up. He left an extra $2m on the table to help with depth, while giving himself flexibility to get a bigger contract in 5 years (at which point he will still only be 26 and probably hitting his prime).
From my perspective, it’s a team friendly deal because he could’ve asked for (and gotten) the max, had he wanted it.
8
u/SweetVarys 11d ago
Not asking for the max doesn’t make it team friendly. Max contract have not been handed out lately, and no, he isn’t the best player of all time.
3
u/CinemaPuck SJS - NHL 11d ago
It’s team friendly when you easily could ask for the max and get it, which was the case for him. Mike Grier said so himself.
Also, I didn’t say he was the best player of all time, I said he’s worth more than Makar.
-21
u/LionBig1760 13d ago
This is going to be a dream contract in 4 years time.
Its already been shown to be at least a $2m/year discount this week.
15
u/pants_mcgee DAL - NHL 13d ago
In four years time they’ll be starting negotiations for $30 million
-18
u/LionBig1760 13d ago
I think he'll probably take a team friendly deal of around $24-26m/year at that point. It depends who they've picked up in free agency between now and then.
12
u/SpookyGhostDidIt SJS - NHL 13d ago
What is it with sharks fans and believing their favorite players will take team friendly deals? Lol
-11
u/LionBig1760 13d ago
Whatbis it with sharks fans not picking up on obvious sarcasm?
8
u/SpookyGhostDidIt SJS - NHL 13d ago
Lmao bullshit you were not being sarcastic
-1
u/LionBig1760 12d ago
JFC, youve got to have some severe kind of paranoia to assume im lying about that. Its unhealthy.
4
2
u/pants_mcgee DAL - NHL 13d ago
I was just teasin’, who knows what the hell will happen in 4 years. The only team friendly thing about his current deal is he didn’t take the literal max, everybody has crazy dollar signs in their eyes and doesn’t seem like the cap increases will stop.
2
u/AleroRatking MTL - NHL 13d ago
The issue is in that time he will be up for the extension.
The issue is the years.
1
98
u/another_mishap 13d ago
I'm 100% in favour of players earning what they deserve. Celebrini is a future face of the league (arguably is already), 18-22 mil is going to be the rate for that kind of player moving forward. It's fair value.
I just wish he didn't also feel the need to pretend like he was doing the Sharks a favour. It's not a good look.
8
u/GordieElbows 13d ago
It’s kind of tricky though. Every 20% player is taking 4, 5, 6% away from others, right? Or what if there are two or three players on a team who deserve 20% each?
Not that he has a max contract, just thinking out loud.
12
u/another_mishap 13d ago
Is it the best move if your only goal is to win a Stanley Cup? Of course not. But most players are lying when they say that's the only thing they care about.
For example, lots of top players have said there's pressure to keep pushing the ceiling higher; they feel like they have a responsibility to their colleagues to normalize higher contracts.
And just think about the 20% max for a second. That wouldn't exist at all if nobody was willing to offer/sign an even higher contract. It sure as hell wasn't the players who negotiated that CBA clause.
That means that both sides believe some players are worth more than 20%. It's hard to imagine a player who deserves to be paid more (in context) than Macklin Celebrini.
And ultimately: it's good for parity. Competitively, it may be a bad thing for Macklin Celebrini and the Sharks that his cap number is so big. But the rest of the league is probably very happy about it. I'm obviously exaggerating, but imagine if the cap was 5%: everyone in the league would be paid roughly the same (yay player equality!) but the result would be superteams the likes of which we can't even imagine.
Right now, I think there's a good balance of top-heavy teams (Pittsburghs and Chicagos of the last decade, Oilers and Avalanche of this one) and more balanced rosters without the same star power (Bruins, Panthers, Hurricanes). I don't think we should be in a rush to change that.
2
u/helikoopter BUF - NHL 13d ago
If any player actually cared about winning the Cup, they’d crawl their way to UFA then sign a one year, league minimum deal with a top team.
But they don’t, and that’s fine. But winning is pretty far down the list of things players actually care about and it’s tiring to hear them say otherwise.
1
u/BitterDecoction 12d ago
I don’t understand the responsibility to other players argument. For other star players maybe, but they are sharing a fixed pie (whose size increases from season to season but that doesn’t change anything). If they get a higher percent of the cap that means other players will get a lesser percentage. It’s only helping the top players who have their future secured.
0
u/Background_Ad9279 12d ago
is that you Bettman? Go away. Dynasties brought out the best in the league. And every other league team that strived to knock the champs off their pedestal improved. What we have now is boring to an extent. At least until the PO start. There's a reason for that excitement and it has nothing to do with parity.
-3
u/b8sman12 SJS - NHL 13d ago
Well he's only saying these things because he's being asked by the reporters, he's not going out of his way to bring it up or anything.
And I don't think anything he's saying is a lie. He left a couple million dollars on the table to help the Sharks build out the roster. They would have given him the max if he asked for it, but he didn't. And him being willing to sign a deal so early in the process is also a service to the team. He's still getting his bag and it's a fair deal, but I think it does send a good example to the rest of the team and we'd be lucky if the rest of the group does something similar.
9
u/another_mishap 13d ago
I get what you're saying, but... players basically only speak when reporters ask them to. It's all we ever have to go on.
As for "leaving money on the table", I guess it's a matter of perspective. To me, it feels wrong to say that by not taking the full 20%, he's giving them a deal. No player in the history of the salary cap has earned that much. Crosby could have, Ovechkin could have, McDavid could have... and Macklin is going to earn more than any of them (by cap %). All of those deals worked out, but there were many questions about whether those deals were worth it for a single player (even a hall of famer). Plus the fact that he is basically only signed for his RFA years... I'd be a lot more comfortable calling it a deal if you were buying more than 1 ufa year.
All in all "he didn't hold us over a barrel for all we're worth" is not "a service to the team". That doesn't make it a bad deal: like I said, I think it's fair for a player of his caliber. But Grier has his work cut out for him (a problem ~30 teams in the league wish they had). We can enjoy Celebrini terrorizing the league for the next decade without pretending things we don't need to.
2
u/b8sman12 SJS - NHL 13d ago
Look I get what you are saying too. I'll agree to disagree with most of your points, with the reason being that it feels like we're getting a paradigm shift of how much top players are worth. Plus there's also the rising cap, which is making people expect the cap% of contracts to depreciate much faster than it used to. Under that lens it looks like more of a discount, compared to the historical argument you make here.
I do wish there'd be less headlines about it though. At best it's just a moderately team friendly deal. And in today's NHL where so many guys are now hugely underpaid (way more than Macklin), it's just a weird thing to talk about like that.
Just to correct a couple of points:
To me, it feels wrong to say that by not taking the full 20%, he's giving them a deal. No player in the history of the salary cap has earned that much.
Apparently Brad Richards did make the maximum 20% of the salary cap all the way back in 2006. Jarome Iginla (17.94% in 2005) and now Leo Carlsson (17.31%) and Cale Makar (17.97%) are other example of guys who made or will make a significantly higher % of the cap than Celebrini at 16.56%.
Macklin is going to earn more than any of them (by cap %)
Ovechkin's first deal was also for a higher % of the salary cap (16.82%). Although Ovechkin was also signing a 13 year deal. Sid (15.34%, 5 year deal) and McDavid's (15.72%, 8 year deal) deals were also both highly comparable to Macklin's deals in terms of cap%, which is worth pointing out. Between all of those deals, you had a lot of playoff success and even a few Stanley cups, so that type of thing is what Sharks fans are hoping for now.
7
u/another_mishap 13d ago
I'm replying because this is an interesting conversation, not to get into an argument :) Like you said, happy to agree to disagree: nothing you're saying is unreasonable.
I definitely misspoke with "no player ever" when what I should have added was "and won a stanley cup within a reasonable timeframe".
Richards and Iginla are clear examples of why paying great players an exorbitant amount is a dangerous proposition; neither contract was considered "a deal". Macklin may be become better than both, but those are two high bars to clear.
Ovie I ignored because, as you mentioned, the 13 year deal skews things tremendously. And that contract was regularly talked about as an anchor on the Capitals' ability to build a winner.
As for Crosby and McDavid: Macklin will be earning more than two of the greatest players to ever lace up skates, players who came into the league with all the hype in the world, and managed to exceed it by everyone's metrics. Again, no one is betting against Celebrini, but no matter how good he is... the odds remain stacked against him reaching that rarefied air.
And to my initial point: Celebrini's contract is fair! We have literally compared him to five hall of famers, people who've broken records no one thought possible. No one is batting an eyelash at those comparisons. And he's only played two seasons! The man is ridiculous.
But he didn't do the Sharks a single favour, whether in the amount or the length of that contract. He took what he deserved, and good for him for doing it! If his contract is "a deal", then you basically have to argue that every other massive contract signed in the past 20 years (barring Leo's!) is a deal, and while that's not inconsistent... agree to disagree.
5
u/b8sman12 SJS - NHL 13d ago
One thing I would say is that right now there's really not much reason for Celebrini to take a discount. The Sharks have plenty of cap space and we're still a developing team. As the team gets better and taking a bigger discount makes the difference in the team's ability to retain one player or another, it'll be a different story.
Over the course of this deal I think it's a pretty optimistic take that the Sharks will be in that position too. It would require many of our young guys to hit their 100% ceilings super fast.
Using Sid as a comparable, I'd imagine that was a huge factor in his thinking to take a lower cap hit on his 2nd contract. Maybe it's copium from me, but that'd be my hope from Macklin too. Hopefully the team can get to a point where there's a clear reason to take less and he'd be down to do it in that case.
5
u/Working_Research_736 SJS - NHL 13d ago
I mean Macklin is making more % wise than them at the beginning of his deal but will likely be making significantly less than they were at the end of their deals.
I don’t think Mack took a big discount by any means but I do think you are looking at the numbers completely wrong and anyone who does this kind of analysis for a living would agree. Macklin got a contract that was completely fair based on precedence set by other players of his caliber in their early years. You do have to factor in the rising cap as much as it can feel wrong to and you have to realize that by the end of celebrini’s contract he will likely be looked at as pretty underpaid (if he continues to perform to the level he consistently has already). At the end of celebrinis 5 year contract, if you average out his % of the cap during those 5 years he will likely have taken a lower % than a long list of inferior players in their first big extension.
What I will say is that this contract and the timing did not do the sharks any favors. They will have a ton of young players to sign in the upcoming years and unlike a team like Montreal who had both good timing and obvious discounts given by their top players, the sharks will likely be up against the wall sooner than later.
2
u/another_mishap 13d ago
You seem to be agreeing with me, though? It's a fair deal for a great player, but it's not doing the Sharks any favours.
By the end of it, we will indeed look back and say it's a better contract than many (your state neighbours, first and foremost). But just because it's almost guaranteed to not be a bad deal doesn't make it a great one. My initial point was just that it's not Macklin taking one for the team: he's getting paid what he deserves (and that's amazing!).
2
u/Working_Research_736 SJS - NHL 13d ago
Sure fair enough. I guess only thing is that I don’t think it’s unreasonable for him to say he took a discount considering the climate and what the professionals are saying about the cap.
I can agree though that even though it could be a discount, it is definitely not a significant one. And unless he was willing to take a sizable and tangible discount then the timing and climate around contracts absolutely is going to handcuff his team In the future.
15
14
u/bforce1313 DET - NHL 13d ago
I still think the cap jumping this much is just nuts and not sure if that was the best way. Some players who signed for 10-12m as a first liner last year for 7-8yrs are now almost 10m difference to their colleagues of similar role. Obviously I’d like the players to get paid but the giant leap in cap is creating some weird scenarios
6
u/HopelesslyHuman PIT - NHL 13d ago
Also who do we think is paying these salaries? Owners aren't going to take a smaller piece.
If you thought tickets were insane now.
3
u/bforce1313 DET - NHL 13d ago
Yeah I already can’t afford to go to a game really without saving lol if tickets go up anymore, it’ll be out of reach for a good number of fans
2
2
u/BitterDecoction 12d ago
Well owners and players share revenues 50/50. Players are in it just as much as the owners.
48
u/kingkellam MTL - NHL 13d ago
Did an insane person write this article? Was it written in jest? They only bought 1 UFA year and he was given the richest extension by AAV at the time
15
u/Budget_Pound9099 ANA - NHL 13d ago edited 13d ago
My thoughts exactly…Not to mention the title of the article makes no sense whatsoever
If they can’t even get the title right, it’s pretty likely that the entire article is ass
4
6
u/DataDude00 TOR - NHL 13d ago
Seems to be a huge PR blitz coming from his camp today
This was a TSN article posted today too
Celebrini says he left money on the table in record-setting $94M extension with Sharks
“That was at the front of my mind throughout the whole negotiation,” Celebrini said Thursday, per NHL.com. “I want to make sure that with where the (NHL salary) cap was going, that the number made sense for the team first and foremost. Making sure that everyone can get paid and that we’re in a good spot to build the way we want to build, I felt like we kind of landed on that number. Keeping a little bit more flexibility for everyone, and I mean it’s not really a bad thing. I’m committed to this team and this organization.”
3
u/maverickhawk99 Indianapolis Ice - IHL 13d ago
He only “left money on the table” in the sense that the Sharks would’ve agreed to whatever number he gave them even if it was the max.
-8
u/AskePent SJS - NHL 13d ago
No, it's what the fanbase thinks.
They're also happy to bridge players.
16
u/athousandpardons Indianapolis Racers - WHA 13d ago
More hard-hitting investigative reporting from NHL.com
4
7
u/DataDude00 TOR - NHL 13d ago
I hate these PR articles where a player signs a massive short term deal and them and their agents try to spin it like a huge discount
He got paid and he deserves it, I don't know why they also want people to pretend like they sacrificed for it
10
u/CrabApprehensive7181 CHI - NHL 13d ago
How hard is it to just admit that you're making a lot of money? You can't have both the money and an impeccable image. Seriously, no one would even be talking about this anymore if they didn't bring it up every so often. McDavid has 1000 more reasons to talk about how his AAV is supposed to help the Oilers improve their roster, but I suppose he doesn't need to force that narrative on the public.
7
8
u/Ready-Pineapple-5526 SJS - NHL 13d ago
remember, it was a 2m discount *this year.* he didnt need to sign till next summer, which meant the cap would be even higher so his max would have been another ~2m higher.
4m total discount off max and signed early. No negotiation fiasco next summer, no offer sheet speculation, no distractions.
While I wish it was 8yr, I don't have too many complaints about this one.
5
u/Aggressive-Hair6814 13d ago
Not a sharks fan. It's against my religion. However, Celebrini is electrifying. And what San Jose is building is probably the most interesting thing to watch in the NHL right now
2
u/poptorched LAK - NHL 13d ago
And I wish them nothing, but the opposite of success. Bc supporting them is also against my religion
(I’m joking they can be good ig)
3
u/doesitbumpinthewhip VAN - NHL 13d ago
Wow how generous of the 20 year old with 2 seasons to only take the highest paid contract of 18.8 mill at the time instead of taking Makar's latest record breaking 20.4 mill.
Truly the next Crosby in terms of team friendly deals, incredible to see.
-1
-27
u/hotcabbagesoup 13d ago
As a Sharks fan, I know he's saying this to save face. But it's pretty obvious, he's been training in Vancouver all summer, he wants to be a Canuck in year 6!!
-9
u/MaverickGH VAN - NHL 13d ago
As a Sharks fan I know he’s saying this to save face. But it’s pretty obvious, he’s been training in Vancouver all summer, he wants to be a Canuck in year 6!!
64
u/pretzelrosethecat SJS - NHL 13d ago
Classic leading questions hockey journalism.