HockeyBuzz Hotstove: Thoughts on Roman Josi's monster extension with the Nashville Predators?

The deal is good. It will hurt eventually, but the time is now for the Preds. Lock him up and hope to win one before he starts to decline (he certainly hasn't started to).

The dollars are fine, in fact you can argue they got a discount for a guy who is a top 5 D-man in the NHL. Not sure what Cordell is smoking, but Josi is not a defensive liability. He may not be a bruiser in his own end, but he is excellent in the D zone, and all-star level as a puck mover and offensive Dman.

Those things said, the term is too long. $9MM x 6 years would've been excellent, but they are paying for past performance to some extent. They've had the guy on a bargain deal for the past few years & he's been excellent. I don't think it's smart to pay for past performance, but I suppose it's better than losing him in free agency. Poile must be banking on a steady increase in the salary cap, or the window for this team is 2-3 years at best.

Heard an argument on radio this morning that Josi might be the most important player from the past 8 years for the Preds. He came in when the Preds lost Suter, and paired up with Weber almost without missing a beat. Then became a premier defender in his own right, and did so at a bargain price that allowed the Preds to bring in some other top offensive talent and extend them. It's a fair point, even if I think the Forsberg, Johansen and Subban trades along with the emergence of Rinne and Josi as all-star players are huge factors in the Preds emergence over the past few years.

The people laughing at Seabrook now will be laughing even harder at Josi 4 or 5 years in. If Nashville could learn anything from Chicago (regarding salaries or how to win cups), you shouldn't reward players for past performance and/or previous sweetheart deals.

Karlsson, Doughty, and Josi - all are brutal contracts.

The dollars are fine, in fact you can argue they got a discount for a guy who is a top 5 D-man in the NHL. Not sure what Cordell is smoking, but Josi is not a defensive liability. He may not be a bruiser in his own end, but he is excellent in the D zone, and all-star level as a puck mover and offensive Dman.

Those things said, the term is too long. $9MM x 6 years would've been excellent, but they are paying for past performance to some extent. They've had the guy on a bargain deal for the past few years & he's been excellent. I don't think it's smart to pay for past performance, but I suppose it's better than losing him in free agency. Poile must be banking on a steady increase in the salary cap, or the window for this team is 2-3 years at best.

Heard an argument on radio this morning that Josi might be the most important player from the past 8 years for the Preds. He came in when the Preds lost Suter, and paired up with Weber almost without missing a beat. Then became a premier defender in his own right, and did so at a bargain price that allowed the Preds to bring in some other top offensive talent and extend them. It's a fair point, even if I think the Forsberg, Johansen and Subban trades along with the emergence of Rinne and Josi as all-star players are huge factors in the Preds emergence over the past few years.
- holycow_75

How is it a discount he is 3rd highest player in NHL and i would argue he is not even top 10 now and in 2 years he will not even be top 20. He will also continue to drop in rankings.
Teams paying players for past never works and is just bad team management. They should let him go or trade him and get as much value back as possible.

This deal is money owed. It'll work for a few years and then likely weigh the team down. Nashville benefitted for so long on his last deal they are now going to make it up to him.

The problem with these deals is that the NHL has started trending in the right direction paying money at the correct age. Signing these deals, like Armstrong in St. Louis, is exactly the opposite of the trend. So as locking up young players and semi-gambling on their likelihood of meeting their potential you are gambling on highly talented players being abberations when statistically it is unlikely, though not impossible. Maybe I'll also win the lottery🤷‍♂️

Fair deal for the next...oh... 4 or 5 seasons. After that it's a question mark. Depends how bad regression hits.

Now, Josi is a special player. His conditioning seems good and his style of play won't fall off a cliff overnight. He could very well prove to be worth his pay (also, considering rising salary cap with a 32nd franchise and the new TV deal) or he could be what we often see: great players slowly becoming good players and all of a sudden becoming 3rd line/3rd pairing guys with insane cap hits.

Time shall tell, but my immediate reaction is cautiously optimistic.

Another masterstroke by David Poile!!!! This is one more reason why he's the best GM in the known universe and has won all those Cups!!!!

What a moronic freaking contract by the most overrated GM in all of pro sports.

The people laughing at Seabrook now will be laughing even harder at Josi 4 or 5 years in. If Nashville could learn anything from Chicago (regarding salaries or how to win cups), you shouldn't reward players for past performance and/or previous sweetheart deals.

Karlsson, Doughty, and Josi - all are brutal contracts.
- ItHossaGood

Then stop underpaying players when they're in their early 20s. It's a double-edged sword. Everyone says that players that sign their RFA extensions shouldn't get big money because they're RFAs and have restricted rights, but then call the big money deals during their first crack at UFA idiotic.

Players are going to get paid. I don't disagree that it's a bad decision to pay them their biggest contracts when they're in their 30s, but to fix that, you gotta make them UFAs when they're in their early-to-mid 20s.

When you look at most of the more rigorous statistical analyses of player aging curves, they all seem to be in basic agreement about the following: On average, player performance peaks around 24-25, "prime" plateaus until about age 29 (90% or better peak effectiveness), then declines more noticeably (and mostly linearly) thereafter.

It's hard to get a really solid estimate for how severe that decline is on average due to survivor bias in the data set, but 5% per year seems like a pretty good guess. That implies that a 35-year-old player is expected to be only about 60% as productive as he was at his peak, which also fits the data we do have pretty well.

The caveat, of course, is that these are averages for a large population, and individual players don't always follow the same curve. Some guys seem to fall of a cliff much younger. A few seem to be completely timeless. Mark Giordano had his best season yet at 35. Nicklas Lidstrom won a Norris at 40.

But those are the exceptions, not the rule. Out of the 50 top scoring seasons from defenders in the last 5 full seasons, only 13 were recorded by players in their 30s. Four of those were Brent Burns, and Byfuglien, Giordano, and Yandle had two each. (Letang, Wideman, and Keith are the others, with one apiece.)

Basically in order for this contract to not stink out loud after just a couple of seasons, Nashville has to hope that Josi is one of those lucky few players who can break the normal aging curve in a big way and extend his "prime" deep into his 30s. Could it happen? Yes. Is it likely to happen? No.

Think of it this way: most guys who are legitimately still $9 million players in their early to mid 30s were probably good enough in their mid-20s to be $12-$15 million players (cap inflation adjusted) if they had been able to reach the open market at that age. Josi's really really really good, don't get me wrong. But he ain't that good.

If Josi were 24, this deal would be good. If he were, say, 27, it would be defensible -- you'd probably feel the crunch by the end of the deal but you could also reasonably expect to be "buying" at least 2 and hopefully 3-5 seasons of "prime Josi" to go along with it, while the team is still in its "win now" window.

But this deal doesn't even kick in until 30, when Josi is already at the point where most players have already started to noticeably decline. To say that's a huge gamble would be an understatement.

This is a sweetheart deal for the Preds. Everyone who's whining about the term can suck a lemon because (A) the salary cap will go up (it's gone up over 20% in the last 8 years) and (B) they're going to have to rebuild eventually. They are in win now mode and no matter how much Josi declines in the later years of the contract, he'll still be a serviceable NHL defenseman based on the way he plays. He's a great skater, puck mover and not terribly physical. Giordano wins a Norris at age 35 in his 14th season. Look at Jay Bouwmeester, he's still contributing to a Stanley cup winning team at the age of 36 and there isnt a single valid argument to suggest on his best day he's ever been as good as Roman Josi. Ron Hainsey (38), Andy Greene (37) are also guys that play big roles on their respective clubs. Is Josi going to put up 60 points every year of this contract, of course not, but HE DOESNT HAVE TO. The Preds are more than happy to overpay for the last couple years (on the salary cap, actual money is front loaded) in order to remain a legitimate Stanley Cup contender for the next 5 years. If there's a single Preds fan who is currently worried about the 2026 season then GTFO because this team is good right now and one of the most complete teams in the NHL today.