Datsyuk has had devastating injuries that inevitably shortened his career effectiveness a bit. At one point I thought he would be like Jagr.
Nielsen isn't Weiss 2.0 considering he's healthy besides the fact that Nielsen is probably the better player.
I just took a look at Pavel Datsyuks stats and I noticed that when Datsyuk was 32 he came in to the season just losing six games in the past four years. Kinda reminds me of Nielsen.
The rest of Datsyuk's career has been injury prone, right?
Datsyuk was also a pretty soft, but extremely smart player on the ice - now, of the top of my head I would kinda expect a player of such caliber to perhaps get slowed down a little and perhaps get hit just a marginal bit more as he gets older, so I would also probably expect a few more injuries to these types of players when they grow older.
I'm not saying this is what will definitely happen to Nielsen, I'm just saying I understand those that worry about the term.
Nielsen is absolutely worth $5,25M a year right now. I won't know about 2020 just yet.
For now he is pretty much a poor mans Datsyuk, so I think it's completely logical for Ken Holland and the rest of the organization to go down this road. Especially with the history of playing the "old teams".
Now, what do I mean by "a poor mans Datsyuk". I mean, I have always compared him to Datsyuk when it comes to his style of play, with the exception that he's just not as good as Datsyuk - not many players have ever been that good, right?
Nielsen is reading the game a lot like Datsyuk. Able to see where the play is going, able to be in the right position to interrupt the oppositions play. His best asset is how he plays without the puck and it also makes him very strong on the PK.
If you take a detailed look at his advanced stats, you will se, though, that his PK abilities suffers when he also plays a lot of minutes on the PP. Not really a surprise, but it's worth noticing that his best PK stats came several years ago and he has not been a league-over-average-effective player on the PK for the past 2-3 years.
Back then I believe he was even for one year the player scoring most points in a season on the PK. He played with tremendously fast Austrian Michael Grabner on the PK and they were the bomb. I think they scored maybe a combined 10-12 goals on the PK that season. Often Nielsen broke up the play and fed Grabner to probably a modern era record high amount of breakaways.
With the puck Nielsen is always playing a sound, safe game with the puck. Not taking major chances with the puck, but still able to make creative plays and open up the ice. A strong and slick skater. Fast without looking fast, if that makes any sense to you..
The speed and the smart distributions with the puck makes him a great neutral zone player both as a puck carrier and setting up simple but effective plays to enter the zone. He is also great at zone entries on the PP, not to mention that he has a great shootout record. Amzing, though, that the goalies of the league still doesn't seem to know him well enough to know that he relies a lot on the same move to the backhand. But one of the reasons it works well still is of course that he is also good to compensate and just shoot if the goalie knows about the backhand and tries to move too soon.
The reason why Nielsen is not having injuries so far - much like Datsyuk at the same age, I suppose - is because he is not involved in the physical play. That is very smart and he is often able to pick the puck away from the opposition in a smart way, but of course it also means, that he's not winning any physical battles, because he simply shies away from these.
So to me a lot of the value to this contract comes down to whether or not Nielsen will still not get slowed down just marginally and whether or not he all of a sudden gets hit.
That's just my 2 cents.