Sheng Peng
It wasn’t about the contract.
That’s not why Mike Grier traded Fabian Zetterlund to the Ottawa Senators.
Grier has said that, and it’s what San Jose Hockey Now has corroborated.
So what was Zetterlund looking for contractually? And how far apart were the San Jose Sharks and Zetterlund?
Here’s what SJHN has heard.
It’s clear that San Jose valued the pending arbitration-eligible RFA, so much so that they made an extension offer earlier in the year.
“They did make us an offer early this year and we chose to wait for after the season,” Claude Lemieux, Zetterlund’s agent, told San Jose Hockey Now. “They asked again to talk contract extension, we agreed and countered a few days ago.”
Mike Grier confirmed the substance of this timeline in his post-Trade Deadline availability.
“I can’t tell you if the trade was the result of the counteroffer or not,” Lemieux said.
“The contract wasn’t really a part of this decision,” Grier said.
Here are some of the rough contractual parameters that we’re talking about.
SJHN has heard that the ask from the Zetterlund camp was below $5 million AAV. The Sharks started above $2 million AAV.
That sounds like Zetterlund and San Jose were really far apart, but again, remember that the 25-year-old winger was an arbitration-eligible RFA.
Meaning, chances are, the two sides were simply going to meet around the middle in the end.
It also wasn’t a question of term: It appears that both sides were content with a bridge-length contract of two or three years.
Anyway, it’s not unusual for a team to start a little low with a dollar figure, a player to start a little high, especially when a player is arbitration-eligible. Typically, arbitration-eligible players don’t even get to the arbitration hearing — before the actual hearing date, player-team usually find common ground.
A recent example of how this process works is Kirill Marchenko last season.
Winger Marchenko, in his last two years in the NHL, before he was an arbitration-eligible RFA last summer, had two 20-goal campaigns, a 44-23-67 total, averaging about 16 minutes a night, all power play, no penalty kill.
Winger Zetterlund, in his last two years, before becoming an arbitration-eligible RFA this summer, is on pace for two-straight 20-goal campaigns, a pro-rated 46-45-91 total, averaging about 18 minutes a night, heavy PP, little PK.
It wasn’t a smooth negotiation between Marchenko and the Columbus Blue Jackets, but they avoided arbitration with a three-year, $11.55 million ($3.85 million AAV) deal late last July.
There’s every reason to believe that the San Jose Sharks and Zetterlund would have found common ground, before arbitration.
And if it came to it, an arbitrator would’ve decided a contract for both Zetterlund and San Jose.
So Zetterlund wasn’t going anywhere…unless the Sharks wanted him to. We know Zetterlund wanted to stay in San Jose.
So in the end, trading Zetterlund was about Grier identifying a player that he liked more long-term in Zack Ostapchuk — or Josh Norris, as Darren Dreger reported on Sunday.