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NHL Rumors did a piece regarding Detroit’s focus on long term deals for both Seider and Raymond. If you do enough surfing, you’ll see some interesting discrepancies. Seider takes the brunt of abuse as he has since draft day 2019. He’d done some interviews where players would tell him he was selected too soon. Last year writers were “critical” of how many minutes he was getting. It felt like insanity once the other side of the issues chimes in. It really hit me when someone who was initially unimpressed with the selection commented that Mo is the only piece on the team he would be disappointed to see traded at this point.

As for Raymond, he broke 30 goals. He did it at a young age and seems to be the type of scorer Detroit has missed out on far too many times in the first round. Both players (opinion) outperformed expectations and with precedents set earlier this year, there are numbers in the realm of 8m for Raymond and a floor for Seider at 8.5. Both of those represent a hope for a 7 or 8 year deal. Interestingly, Lidstrom has made some statements regarding negotiations and there at least seems to be a high level of confidence on getting this done. With less than 2 weeks until camp, the sooner the better.

So, let me know your thoughts. Are you at 8x8 for Raymond and possibly 8 x 9 for Seider? These players represent a shift in post ELC deals for the organization, to be sure.

At this point, I’m going to talk about the DirecTV standoff with ESPN/Disney. If you’re not interested, skip this portion.

At this point, 11 million DirecTV customers lost access to collegiate and NFL games. In 2022, the Monday night draw for ABC (and ESPN by proxy) was 8 million viewers. The only program drawing more was Sunday night which drew 10 million per week. NBC owns that and Youtube TV has Sunday Ticket so it really falls onto ESPN to get customers to move to another platform. I’ve told you for the past year about the plan for an ESPN stand alone service for streaming.

Here’s the debate. Disney is demanding ESPN be on every tier of DirecTV. With all the other channels, it’s about $10 per customer that gets collected whether people watch the channel or not. Roughly 60% of customers weren’t watching, so DirecTV wants to move it to a higher tier and offer a lower priced package. For alternatives during the dispute, Hulu is getting a lot of recommendation. Hulu is owned by Disney. This seems like a big jump forward to get customers off of TV and onto the stream. DirecTV is in court filing a grievance, and ESPN/Disney just had a ruling shut down Venu sports as a monopoly, being appealed.

For the bottom line, as much as it may stink find a streaming option as a backup. This newest dispute is incredibly aggressive during the most profitable part of the year for the companies pulled from DirecTV.

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