Zack Kassian of the Edmonton Oilers is approaching free agency and Jonathan Willis of The Athletic looks at Ken Holland's signing of Justin Abdelkader's contract.
Each player is a unique case, and the fate of one will not necessarily befall the other. Yet what happened in Detroit is a useful cautionary tale. Too often the NHL is a “what have you done for me lately?” kind of league, and long-term perspective functions as ballast: keeping a ship stable and centered even when a sudden change in forces tries to tip it rapidly in one direction or the other....
When Abdelkader was 27, he started getting power-play time with regularity. He scored eight goals and added six assists in his first season in the gig, blowing his meagre career numbers in the discipline (three points, two of them recorded late the preceding season) out of the water.
This helped explain a dramatic change in his offensive results. In five full seasons in the NHL, Abdelkader had never topped 10 goals or 30 points. At 27, he scored 23 times and recorded 44 points. His career highs weren’t confined to those categories; he also averaged 17:55 per game after previously topping out at 15:17, and he scored on 14.9 percent of his shots, his prior best in a season being 10.4 percent.
Abdelkader continued scoring at the same pace early in his age-28 season, which was when Detroit made the decision to sign him to a contract extension rather than allow him to go to the open market in the summer. The Red Wings signed him to a seven-year, $4.25 million AAV deal....
Now midway into the fourth season of that seven-year extension, Abdelkader has averaged 27 points per 82 games played over its life so far, a scoring pace essentially identical to what he put up prior to the deal.
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