Report: Eric Staal wants $9 million per year on next contract

It was reported by Renaud Lavoie of TVA that Eric Staal would like $9 million a year for his next contract. I also want to be the King of England.

While Staal is a very good player and a player who is still playing like a first liner, it is a number that not a lot of people will pay for come next offseason. Especially after the spending last summer was much more tempered than expected.

Dashboard 1 (12)

If you take a quick look at the Hero Chart above, you will see that Staal is still performing like a first line player, for the most part. His scoring has gone down significantly though over the past five years. His scoring peak most recently was in 2010-11′ with 76 points. This past year he scored 54 points which was his lowest point total where he played more than fifty games in a season since his rookie year. He is moving backwards slowly but surely and isn’t on the right side of the aging curve. Strong money has him having an even lower point total this year.

This year Staal’s cap hit is $8.25 million and the actual money made is $9.5 million. This currently puts him in the same wage bracket as Ryan Getzlaf and Claude Giroux, who are already vastly outperforming him. When you up his salary to $9 million he then would be receiving similar pay to the Evgeni Malkin’s and P.K. Subban’s of the world, which simply isn’t going to happen. His current performance calls for a steep pay decrease, when taking a deeper look he should be looking at close to $6 million on a short term deal. While this may hurt his ego it still puts him in a similar pay range as players like Joe Pavelski and Henrik Zetterberg, who are also similar in age.

It could be a negotiation tactic for him to come out with such a large number but who is to say what is going through Eric Staal and his agent’s brain. The Hurricanes are a young up and coming team and the hope now is this won’t be an ongoing distraction through out the season. I wouldn’t cross your fingers on this one.

About Sam Blazer

Sam is a self proclaimed chess prodigy. He once placed seventh in the state of Ohio in Chess when he was in kindergarten. He will rarely if ever mention though that only eight people were entered in this tournament. Contact him at sblaze17@gmail.com

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