that goes without saying, but are the negatives worth the positives?
Are the positives of doing it the other way worth the negatives?
Both of those approaches offer different benefits and drawbacks.
Deals like Zetterberg are an extreme we literally won't see again, but if a player isn't worth the extra million or two, is he worth keeping at all?
Depends. When you do that two or three times you're also asking 'If this player is worth a million or two more, is doing that two or three times worth having those three players instead of three guys with long term deals with lower AAVs
plus a fourth we can add via the yearly cap savings?'
I agree about the balancing act, but it doesn't seem as if we're being too choosy about who gets those long term deals. Giving them to older guys who either didn't have high upsides to begin with and/or play games that seem to fall of a cliff rather quickly with age is taking a campfire and throwing cups of gasoline at it.
Nah.
17, 11, 8, 5. That how many guys are under contract through next year (meaning 17-18), the year after, the year after, and the year after. In terms of population it's not bad and that includes the Franzen deal (which was a bad break) and the Zetterberg deal (which he won't finish out).
As far as the individuals getting the deals, there's a case to be made that there are some flaws. I don't like the Helm deal, for instance, and most (all) people don't.
People are also complaining about the Abdelkader deal, right? '7 years is too long' yadda yadda yadda. Ok. The way the salaries break down is that 7 year deal is really a 4 year and a 3 year deal signed simultaneously, to run consecutively. 4 years @ 20.25 mil and then 3 @ 9.5. There's a clear break in compensation levels which expresses this intent.
So, had Holland signed Abdelkader to a 4 year deal it would have been a 5+ cap hit. By rolling up the "second" 3 year deal into this one he saved 1.25, 750k, 750k, 500k in cap in each of the first four. That's the good news. The bad news is he A) costs himself 750k, 1.25 and 1.25 on the last three years caps and B) buys into the long term risk of Abdelkader's health status.
If Holland's primary concern is maximizing the teams' playoff chances in the immediate term (and obviously it is) you like that tradeoff more because it gives you some more flexibility up front, and you can figure out the back end later on. For the posters here who have different objectives, their evaluation of the deal will vary according to those differences.