As training camp looms, Carolina Hurricanes roll dice on expiring contracts for big names
Brett Pesce, still here.
Brady Skjei, still here.
Teuvo Teravainen, still here.
And all without new contracts that go beyond this season.
Carolina Hurricanes owner Tom Dundon wasn’t joking last spring about going all in on this campaign. When training camp opens this week, all three players will be entering the final year of their contracts, putting the Hurricanes in a position where they risk losing them for nothing after the season.
Those matters are typically handled over the summer, either through trade or contract extension, but nothing emerged that made sense for both sides (and, Hurricanes general manager Don Waddell said, hasn’t even been discussed since July).
“We’d like to get something done but it’s not there to be done right now,” Waddell said. “We can’t force it.”
Which means the Hurricanes will roll the dice on all three in pursuit of a Stanley Cup, willing to risk anything to win everything.
Pesce and Skjei are both unquestioned top-four defensemen in the prime of their careers, the kind that can command huge contracts on a free-agent market conditioned to overpay for players like them. (Even the Hurricanes willingly overpaid for Dmitri Orlov over the summer, in return for a shorter-term contract that fit their salary-cap situation.)
If it gets to the end of the season, the Hurricanes are unlikely to be able to re-sign both, and they will have foregone the presumably strong returns either would bring in a trade. NHL teams, and the Hurricanes especially, typically hate that kind of uncertainty. For the moment, with Orlov joining the five returning defensemen, the Hurricanes have the deepest blue line in the NHL, and arguably the best top to bottom.
Teravainen is less of a gamble, since his value as a trade asset is lower given his recent history and the Hurricanes will be expecting his best in a contract year. He’s the kind of player, at 29, where it may make some sense to let him play out his contract and wish him the best elsewhere with a laurel and a hearty handshake. Sebastian Aho will get over it.
Still, in some ways, it’s all a very un-Dundon approach to contract management. Letting an asset depreciate to zero isn’t his style – and there’s certainly plenty of time, six months before the NHL trade deadline, for a resolution, one way or the other – but in this case the potential costs of being trapped in a negotiating corner at the end of the year were outweighed by the competitive benefits.
“We’re waiting to see how things go,” Waddell said, “and we’ll deal with it.”
So for all the changes over the offseason, most notably Orlov and winger Michael Bunting, the Hurricanes will still have a very familiar look, with some of their longer-serving faces returning when they could have departed: Pesce, Skjei, Teravainen and both goalies, who sniffed the free-agent market and decided to stay.
There was already a lot riding on this season – Can the Hurricanes handle the evolution from everyone’s favorite playoff sleeper to everyone’s playoff favorite and finish the job? – but until and unless those contract situations are resolved in some way, there’s even more hanging in the balance.
Which, after so many seasons with so little on the line, is actually kind of refreshing. There’s no risk in pushing all your chips into the middle of the table when you only have a handful. Bigger stakes bring bigger rewards.
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This story was originally published September 15, 2023 at 10:38 AM with the headline "As training camp looms, Carolina Hurricanes roll dice on expiring contracts for big names."
