travis konecny

The Philadelphia Flyers bet the house with the Travis Konecny contract extension

Over the last couple of days, I haven’t been able to sit down and dedicate myself to long-form writing. Danny Briere seemed to take that as an invitation to do all of the things he knew I’d abhor.

It all starts with the Travis Konecny contract extension. Now, to be entirely honest with you, I can’t help but wonder if this was some sort of assassination attempt!

Travis Konecny inks 8-year extension with the Flyers, announced first by hockey insider Travis Sanheim >>

The Travis Konecny extension was announced while I was driving. It doesn’t take a deep familiarity with my work to know that I was vehemently opposed to such a contract unless it was a notably team-friendly deal.

Suffice to say: The Travis Konecny extension wasn’t a team friendly deal.

At absolute best, this is a market value deal. Now, the case for that is flimsier than people want you to believe. The comps that people point to really don’t call for this kind of deal. The most popular comparison is Timo Meier.

For one thing, Timo Meier was coming off of 35 and 41 goal seasons while almost exclusively playing for the Sharks during that time. His 10% and 12% conversion rate on his shots were well within established career norms.

Travis Konecny has had 31 and 33 goal seasons over the last two years, which has marked a true renaissance period for the player. These two seasons are the entire basis for this contract. But over those two seasons, his conversion rates have been 16% and 13.5% respectively. This last season was only slightly ahead of his career average, but the first of the two years was a massive outlier.

Talking about what Konecny has done combined in the last two seasons is, therefore, highly suspect. His numbers are being inflated by a career year he isn’t likely to repeat by the numbers.

Proponents of the deal cite the strength of Konecny’s team as something that allegedly holds him back from greater production. Rather humorously, those same proponents suddenly don’t want to cite Timo Meier as a comparable any longer. Why?

Timo Meier was on the Sharks, a team every bit as bad or worse as the Flyers have been over those two seasons to end his contract. He went to the Devils and produced 37 goals and 66 points in 90 games played.

That 0.73 points per game mark is actually worse than his last two seasons with the Sharks, where he produced 0.95 points per game.

People want to comfortingly tell you that Travis Konecny’s contract was market-value because he compares excellently to Timo Meier, but there’s a lie by omission in that statement.

So far, the Timo Meier contract has been a massive letdown for the Devils and they probably wish they never signed it.

For the Devils, there is some cause for optimism. In his last 26 games of the NHL season, he produced 18 goals and 30 points. Unfortunately, it comes alongside a massive asterisk: he was shooting 19%.

Despite that significant proviso, there does remain some limited cause for optimism. If you regulate his shooting percentage to 10%, he would still have produced 10 goals and 23 points in his last 26 games. With injuries behind him, he appeared much more like himself.

Despite that, however, I still don’t believe the Devils are jumping for joy at the prospect of Timo Meier playing for another 7 years at nearly 9 million per season.

Another comparison that was thrown out there was Jake Guentzel, who received a $9 million dollar contract over 7 years from the Tampa Bay Lightning.

Now, I happen to believe that Guentzel is a better player than Konecny. But I’m not going to waste my time getting into the weeds there. For the sake of argument, let’s assume that Travis Konecny and Jake Guentzel are precisely equivalent players.

If Guentzel received that AAV over 8 years like Konecny did? His actual number would be $7.8 million.

Now, that’s a more appropriate salary. If this contract was 8×7.75, I might learn to live with it. From a modeling standpoint, that would be almost precisely market-value.

The problem is that the Flyers overshot even that mark with the contract they gave him. As it stands, he is projected to be overpaid to start… and then more overpaid with each passing year as his game begins to decline like every single player of his age.

Indeed, as Dom of the Athletic points out, he’ll need to take another step forward to be worth this money. And from the perspective of someone trying to build a contending Flyers team, that’s unacceptable. That kind of contract is unforgivable.

It’s egregious that it takes me to tell you this. It’s simply ridiculous that a guy with a laptop and an opinion is the only person in the Flyers ecosystem who is willing to dive into the details of a contract of this magnitude. It pisses me off.

One of the clarion calls on Flyers social media is that it “isn’t ideal but isn’t the end of the world, no reason to be pissed off.”

First of all, I’m going to be clear. What pisses me off isn’t really contracts and whether they came in 2 million too large or 2 million too small. What pisses me off is people trying to shut down debate by telling them they’re emotional, reactionary children if they dare to have an opinion that threatens their carefully cultivated safe space.

I’m having none of it. My opinion will be my opinion, and I will say it as I see it.

This was a bad contract for the Flyers. Travis Konecny’s agent took Briere to the cleaners. Maybe going into Meier and Guentzel isn’t enough to prove that case. Maybe I have to regale you with some more comparable deals that make this contract look like a calamity in the making?

“But Florida doesn’t count! No state tax!”

First of all, yes, they do count. Florida counts because you are competing with the Panthers on a year-in and year-out basis. When this team is contending, hopefully, the Panthers will still be one of the league’s premiere threats. When this team is contending, if it’s lucky enough to make it that far, their likely opponent in an Eastern Conference Finals matchup will be the Florida Panthers.

How do you expect to unseat the Panthers if you allocate more salary for less production than they do? Please tell me: how?

Second of all, Florida has had the benefit of no state taxes for as long as the Panthers have existed. It has never helped before. They were one of the worst run franchises in the league. They were on the precipice of having their doors forcibly shut, if I had to guess. And then they cleaned out their front office.

Then they brought in people like Bill Zito. A former player agent and a ruthless negotiator who took Sam Reinhart… one of his Stanley Cup winning team’s best players… to the eleventh hour before the player was an unrestricted free agent. Because he was confident that he could get Reinhart at a great price. Because he believed that the Panthers were the place to be. And he was right.

He got the price he wanted.

The Flyers signed Travis Konecny nearly a year before he reached unrestricted free agent status and surrendered all leverage almost on demand.

The Flyers paid a premium.

How do you expect this team to compete with the Panthers in the near future when this is how both franchises are run?

Unfortunately, Reinhart isn’t the only poor comparable that Konecny runs into. Then there’s Pavel Buchnevich.

Not only did Buchnevich take nearly a million less than Konecny did despite producing the same, he took it on a contract that was 6 years instead of 8. If he had received that same money over an 8 year period, the actual AAV would have been 6 million.

Konecny got money for more years to bring an almost identical value. That is completely absurd.

The Flyers were never in an ideal position to resign Travis Konecny. They are an ostensibly rebuilding franchise who has no designs on contention for, at minimum, the next two seasons. Reasonably, there needed to be some kind of incentive for the team to take on this contract.

Maybe the AAV comes in a little lighter than it should have. Maybe he takes fewer years than you anticipated. Anything, really. Any reason to say that this is an opportunity the Flyers have to take.

But no, there was no such inducement. Travis Konecny was paid like an unrestricted free agent. The Flyers paid top-dollar to keep him around.

Is it because Danny is literally the dumbest human being of all time and doesn’t have access to basic modeling? Of course not. It’s because Danny is too close to the situation. He’s too close to Konecny.

See, Danny thinks Travis Konecny is going to take another step at 27 or 28 years old. Because Danny knows Travis. All Danny can see is that Travis works so hard. Danny has worked with Travis to improve in order to create the last 2 seasons of Konecny, and all Danny can see is the rosy outcome that this is only the beginning for a special player who is going to defy every shred of research gathered on this sport for over a decade. Because the research wasn’t done around TRAVIS!

Maybe he’s right. Maybe Travis Konecny is a once-in-a-generation phenomenon who completely defies aging curves and continues developing at a rapid pace into his thirties. I can’t completely rule that out. Maybe it happens.

But you never should have paid for Konecny on the basis that this would happen. This isn’t a likely scenario. This is the rosiest possible projection, and he just handed Konecny nearly 9 million dollars a year until the world meets an unkind end on the basis of that projection.

This is the problem with hiring every former Flyer that comes down the pike. Everyone who ever grasps the reigns of power has been thoroughly indoctrinated before they ever have to make a decision. Everyone who ever sees a position of authority already believes all of the same preconceived notions that the organization believes.

There’s no fresh perspective. There’s nobody to say: “Guys, I know you believe this might happen. But what if it doesn’t?”

That’s why they keep making cataclysmic decisions. That’s why they can’t get out of their own way. It’s because they believe in a litany of things that turn out to not be reality.

If you presented these arguments to the Flyers behind closed doors, they’d shrug and say that Travis Konecny will eventually be better than Sam Reinhart and Jake Guentzel. They’d say that they got a bargain when Travis Konecny develops even further and he’s objectively better than Timo Meier, too.

Like I said, maybe that all happens. I, for one, am not willing to bet the team’s future on that proposition. To me, the Flyers are like every gambling addict that’s ever been. They think it’s impossible to lose in the moment they make the bet, and then they figure out that… actually… the game was never rigged for them.

But hey. Sometimes, the addicts win.

You better hope that Danny trusted the right people this time. Not like what he did later in this week from hell, and the subject of my next piece.

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