But why? Belleville needs him for the run and he will learn more down there. Plus he needs to stay down in Belleville and not play games here (10 games) to begin his contract and so we can avoid having to protect him in the Seattle draft .
The ineptitude of this franchise continues . No reason to bring him up. It's like Dorion is incapable of leaving his shiny new toys in a box and instead rips open the package, plays with them for a while and wrecks them of their value .
He apparently has to play 11 games to be eligible.
I'm open to the idea that I might be wrong about this, obviously, as we've already learned in this thread the CBA is fairly expansive....
Him and Comtois are both under 20 and eligible for an ELC slide, so I'm assuming it works the same for both of them.
The Sens have three choices....
1-Don't burn a year of Brannstrom's ELC
2-Burn a year by playing Brannstrom 10 games, but don't play him 11 (He won't be eligible for expansion)
3-Play him in 11+ of the 12 remaining games. Burns a year, and makes him eligible for expansion.
3 makes no sense so it should be thrown out the window.
There are merits to both 1 and 2.
Defenseman take longer to develop and settle in at the NHL level. So if we burn year 1 of his ELC now, we could possibly sign him to a 6-8 year extension as soon as July 1st 2020 (with 1 year left on his ELC) instead of having to wait until July 1st 2021.
This could be the difference between getting him at Shea Theodore/Seth Jones type money (6.5-7.5 percent of the salary cap) or getting him at Ekblad/Karlsson/Doughty/Pietrangelo type money (10-11 percent of the cap).
It's all relative though, this is assuming he's projecting to be a top pairing #1 defender. If he's projecting to be lesser than that, just adjust the contract to that.
The point is, if his ELC finishes earlier, when he gets a chance to sign his second contract, it's likely that he'll be less established than he would be if he had 1 more year to play his stock up. Given that the Senators do not need cap/salary relief in the short term after trading away all of our big money contracts, it might make sense to sacrifice that 3rd year of his ELC in order to attempt to put us in a better position to negotiate his 2nd contract.