I've long been of the opinion that, barring a significant change caused by the new CBA (in this regard it helped a bit, but not a lot), Luongo's contract makes him worth very little in trade (like Komi and Lombardi plus a 3rd kind of value, which was never popular, but that was my opinion). One of my main points was that if he were a UFA today he wouldn't receive anything close to what his deal currently is. Well, I decided to look at the top 10 salaries for goalies (plus Luongo) including their age when the contract starts (but not the year when it was signed, so Fleury looks much better than Quick 'cause it happened ages ago), the total expected salaries for playing years (if they have backdiving stuff at the end I took the salary out of the total and included a cap years column so you'll know it's there), the average salary per playing year, and the number of years.
Code:
Name----- Age Total Avg. Yrs CapYrs
Rinne---- 29 49.00 7.00 7
Quick---- 27 49.00 7.00 7 3
Lundqvist 26 41.25 6.88 6
Bryzgalov 31 47.50 6.79 7 2
Luongo 33 40.28 6.71 6 3
Kiprusoff 32 33.50 6.70 5 1
Price---- 25 39.00 6.50 6
Ward----- 27 37.80 6.30 6
Miller--- 30 31.25 6.25 5
Fleury 24 35.00 5.00 7
The Luongo deal shown is not his entire deal, just what the Leafs (or anyone else) would be taking on. All contracts assume the world plays out exactly as intended where they play the full salary years and retire away the cap years (Quick is a bit odd in this case, but since he's got three super cheap years I don't see him expecting to play for that even if he's only in his mid-30's). This is unlikely to be the case, but I find the cap years included skew the AAV picture and years by a ton and taken out you see the market fairly clearly.
Looking at the chart, he'd be paid at the going rate for elite goalies (6.71 instead of 7.00), but already 33 (not on the list, but Thomas is a good example of a guy who got about 1-1.5 less than market for already being old when he signed). That's an overpayment, but looking at Bryzgalov and even what Kipper got years ago, it's hardly a large one. Meaning, IMO if was a UFA right now, he'd probably get something not too far off this deal, which really kind of boggles my mind and wasn't what I expected.
Now, you can spin potentialities a lot of ways and probably more that make it a bad contract than a good one, but that'd be true of trying to ink just about any UFA goalie too.
That doesn't mean I'd include any of Gardiner, Reilly, or a future 1st, and Kadri would be quite painful, but I don't see where a potential elite goalie is coming from otherwise anytime soon (if you believe in Reimer, fair enough, but I'm not sold). Sure, there's always a chance you can steal Bernier and he pans out or you pick the right Anderson type or acquire a Lehner type young guy before he make the league and adjusts quickly (just had OTT goalie on the brain there), but those are pretty much pipedreams in comparison to the reality of Luongo's availability and track record. You could trade for Luongo and draft a future star goalie next year and he'd easily fit into Luongo's salary timetable (back-up in 3-4 years, with a 1-2 year audition before starting). Developing young goalies takes forever.
So yesterday I would've called Burke (or Nonis) lots of mean names if they'd traded Kadri and Bozak for Luongo, today I'd probably grit my teeth a bit about losing Kadri and just keep my fingers crossed for Luongo's health and stability.
vancouver and boston are both tough markets like toronto
