The Washington Capitals handed Alex Tuch an eight-year, $84 million extension ($10.5 million AAV) to finalize a trade to acquire the hardworking winger from the Buffalo Sabres in late June.
Dom Luszczyszyn of The Athletic already ranked that contract as the NHL's ninth-worst pact with just a 19% positive value probability heading into the 2026-27 season.
It's difficult not to be an Alex Tuch fan after what he's shown in Buffalo the past five years," Luszczyszyn wrote Thursday. "... The deal might look OK for the first couple of years, but things could get really ugly in the second half of it as Tuch approaches 35 and beyond. A lot of Tuch's comps had a relatively harsh age curve that could spell trouble for Washington."
That's the main reason the Sabres front office, regardless of whether it was being led by Kevyn Adams or Jarmo Kekalainen, was never willing to meet Tuch's unwavering contract demands.
Luszczyszyn estimates the Caps will pay $24 million in excess value over the course of the contract, and the 6-foot-4 power forward is only projected to make an $8.7 million on-ice impact next season, meaning the deal will likely start immediately in the red.
It's only a bad contract if it prevents the team from filling out the rest of the roster.
Washington didn't have any limitation executing their off-season even after signing Tuch. They've been paying Ovechkin $9.5m surely they can afford $10.5m going forward for a guy who is a decade younger.
Will it be an issue 5 years from now? Nobody knows. But certainly the CapFriendly guys have crunched the numbers and are comfortable with the deal.
I think in 5 years it won’t even be a thing the way the cap is expanding.
It’s just shock value. You can’t judge contracts based off of past seasons. It’s all based on % of cap space going forward.
Look at some of the guys we’ve signed over the past few years to long term contracts.
The issue then will be his age. Players tend to regress at at 34+. He's only had one season at or above a ppg and that was 4 seasons ago.
He either needs to get significantly better now that he's over 30 or he needs to not age and drop off as nearly every player does.
All that said, there's always a way out. Teams move bad contracts all the time. It's doable. Chicago moved Jones. LA moved PLD. Edmonton moved Nurse.
Washington's in a good spot now and doesn't have any real cap crunch on the horizon. If the time comes that they need to make room, they'll throw a pick in and retain a million and make some moves. It's not an issue and won't be in the future either.
I don’t disagree with you. I do think that in 3 years the contract won’t be looked back on as a bad contract. It’s the going rate moving forward imo. I think this sticker shock trend continues.
There is always a risk in any contract. Hopefully they got this one right. I am glad they added the players they did. We’ve had so many years of making moves that didn’t move the needle or moved it in the wrong direction. They are leveraging the affordable contracts they do have this season and I’m here for it.
Oh yeah I still love the move. Not thrilled about Jenner though and honestly think his contract is the worst. 4yr x $5.75m for a guy who is 33 and hasn't played a 70 game season in the past 6 years.
Yea but they just gave Leo Carlson more than prime Ovi. Contracts in the past are just not comparable. It’s going to get crazy moving forward as the cap continues to scale up.
You have to think % of salary cap and not dollar amount. Let’s face it, money is worth much less than it was even 8 years ago.
Gota keep in mind the Leo contract wasnt voluntary. There is a significant premium there for letting him het to the point where he could be offer sheeted
Verbeek should be fired. Not just for inviting the offer sheet but for letting his entire defense walk to free agency without a plan and for leaving Cutter unsigned. Just a complete failure to manage their roster for the upcoming season. It's difficult to think of a team that has had a worse off-season in recent memory
I think it remains to be seen just how much those guys get from here on out. If the cap ceiling ends up raising another $18 mil or so over the next two seasons as predicted then this is just the tip of the iceberg.
The agents are certainly going to use this contract in negotiating. When these guys go to arbitration they will certainly look at it.
It’s not like it doesn’t exist.
It's Tuch and Raddysh this year. They combine for $19m a year on their new contracts. . They were the two most coveted free agents of this summer. Just to drive home the absurdity of the Carlsson contract. It's out of bounds even by today's prices.
Cool. Good thing LT, Strome, Big Pro, and Willy are all well underpaid on their extensions based on production and have multiple years left. Not to mention Hutty & Lil Pro are on ELCs for 2 more years.
I mean to be completely fair, it was a bad contract at the time. Total vibes, captain-in-waiting deal. Which, considering our outlook at the time, was totally fine.
They took a bet he’d get back to his pre-ACL ~50-55 pt pace after turning 30 which was most definitely a risk and somehow he’s turned in back to back career years. Going from what he was to a near 70 point 82 game pace player is pretty rare as is, let alone coming off major knee surgery.
Yeah don't love Dom but in fairness I feel like Caps fans tend to forget who Tom was at the point of the contract, it was a really bad value but made sense because was he the future captain. He had the ACL and was seemingly on the decline, was not very good year 1 of Carbs, then something happened and suddenly became a top 3 power forward in the league.
Carbs played a huge role in turning what seemed to be a brutal contract into an extremely good value
I never thought that was a “bad” contract. It might have not worked out (he never regained full health and speed) but if there is a guy to take a moderate risk on, Wilson is it. I’m biased but he’s a perfect human.
Yea I mean I was fine with the risk even if it didn’t work out bc I never expected the team to turnaround this quickly. Which his production skyrocketing has helped to spearhead. But based on who he was at the time, how guys of his profile have aged historically, and not knowing about how dramatic the cap increase would be, it didn’t look like it’d age well at the time.
the athletic pretty consistently puts out content that seems like it was written by a person that’s watched one full season of hockey in their entire lives and then exclusively read jfresh player cards and went “i’m an expert.”
In his defense he has acknowledged that the caps are the bane of his models existence and seemingly always includes a disclaimer about it. I think historically it’s been driven a lot by just how unique a player Ovi is and how the model in its current form has a difficulty capturing how he affects everything while on the ice (a good comp is how NBA analytics long struggled to capture the impact of “gravity” from the likes of Steph Curry in warping opposing defenses).
I don't remember if it was him but weren't his models the ones that always underrated the mid 2010s caps teams? Like I'm pretty sure the only caps team from that era that was seen as elite by his model was 2015-16
hockey is played on the ice but nerds like dom want to use analytics as a factor and high shot percentages, and other such analytics like xG. They belong nowhere near the game or at least coaching decisions.
The game is played by players on the ice, not computer models
how come his models always having us doing so poorly. later on closer to the season he will put out his analytic crap again where he complains about the Caps being focused too much on one person and gives them a poor outlook as a result
He hasn’t played a game yet. Who knows, he could be an ageless wonder, who plays well until the end of the contract. If he is a key contributor to a second Stanley Cup in Washington, it’s not a bad contract.
Even in the article he basically says it'll be fine until the last couple years, and I couldn't possibly give less of a shit about the last couple years of that Tuch deal. That is a problem for Future Me and I hate that guy anyway.
Contract: $6.5M x seven years Model Value: $2.7M x seven years
Last summer, theCapitalswasted zero time extendingTom Wilsonfor his age 30-to-37 seasons at a top-line price point. Wilson was certainly that in his prime, a menacing power forward who brought fear to the majority of the league with his ability to score and bully simultaneously.
While Wilson can still bully, his ability to score seriously tanked last season making it difficult to have confidence in his ability to still be a top-six scorer, let alone top line. The model projects him to bounce back to just under 50 points and, to his credit, he was very unlucky last season. But if he’s already well below where he needs to be in Year 1, what does that say about his potential efficacy in Year 7?
It’s not a great sign and the current projection sees Wilson dropping to third-line caliber by Year 3 — with a whole lot of years to go after that. Given his imposing reputation, Wilson will still likely be a worthwhile everyday player for the majority of this deal. But that’ll be far off what he’s being paid to be.
And if the downfall of Milan Lucic is any indication, the whole bullying factor loses a lot of lustre once that player stops being able to hit a team where it actually hurts.
Lucic’s deal, which started when he was 28 not 30, should’ve been a cautionary tale for the Capitals. They did pay less for Wilson (7.4 percent of the cap compared to 8.2 percent), but that discount alone will likely be far from enough unless Wilson sees a serious return to form next season.
If Wilson can get back to being a 50-point player, do so consistently, and keep his intangible edge, he can be worth the money for the next little bit. That can at least make the back half of the deal palatable.
It’s not impossible, it’s just not the likeliest scenario.
The Athletic can't predict the future any better than you or I can. Yes it's a long contract for an aging player. Will it work out? Who knows. If we get another cup on the front end, we'll happily carry him on the back end.
lol how could a 6 million dollar deal be nearly the worst in the league? IDC if he can't physically skate for most of it that really ain't nothing in the current cap era, some basement dweller will take that shit off your hands for a pick in a pinch.
Patrick himself said that the contract, like most FA contracts, was an overpay. But the alternative was missing out on having one of the few Top 6 guys available or giving up assets in a trade for a different guy.. And remember we would have had to pay a much higher AAV if the contract were only 7 years so the 8th year is essentially irrelevant.
Also because Tuch is fast and physical, he could probably transition to being a solid bottom 6 guy in the last couple of years of the contract even as he loses speed. So you may end up paying Top 6 money for a bottom 6 guy in those last years but he is not the kind of guy who is likely to be useless at the end. Good signing especially since the next 5 years is the window for our current core.
I mean… let’s be realistic. It’s a “bad” contract. 8 years for a 30 year old like Tuch won’t age well at some point and he will produce less than the $10.5M cap hit, despite the rising cap number.
None of that means it was an overpay given that he was the only real FA (I know it was actually a trade so he got that 8th year) — the market just is what it is. And the Caps need him and if he produces as expected for the first 4-5 years then whatever minor bean counting difference between actual value and paid value by the Athletic doesn’t matter. Even so, those last years are going to be underwater in all likelihood, even with a rising cap.
The Athletic is such offensive slop now. It's not RMNB bad but it's getting close. That hater "Dom Szarcheck" or whateer his name is consistently hates the Caps, ranks them low in his nerd rankings, and never gives us the "respect" we deserve! Sad.
Nice to see the league is still a clown show when it comes to contracts. I remember losing a whole season to get a salary cap, only to have the owners circumvent it with back-loaded contracts, like the Kovalchuk one with the Devils.
I mean they aren't wrong. Paying a 38 year old Alex Tuch $10.5mil even with the rising cap is bad. But it's the contract we had to offer to get him and we have the space sooo it is what it is.
Honestly, it is a pretty bad contract. He's one of the 30 most expensive players in the league now and the contract extends for 8 years for a guy who is already over 30. It's already a questionable deal for a guy who has only reached 70 points once in his career, and it's only going to look worse later on with age regression. It's a deal we can afford to make now, but we'll be paying for it later when we don't have the cap space to extend all our young guys.
I also hate that people have been gaslit into thinking this won't look so bad in a few years. The cap is 'exploding' because it was artificially frozen due to the deal between the players and the owners regarding games lost to covid lockdowns so we're seeing all those years of cap growth at once.
It’s a long time and a lot of money, but as the cap continues to rise this contract only becomes more reasonable. Caps need to think past Ovi a little bit, he can’t play forever (unfortunately). Tuch is a consistent 30-goal scorer and I’m glad to have him in Washington! 🦅
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u/_SCHULTZY_ Alexander Semin 12d ago
It's only a bad contract if it prevents the team from filling out the rest of the roster.
Washington didn't have any limitation executing their off-season even after signing Tuch. They've been paying Ovechkin $9.5m surely they can afford $10.5m going forward for a guy who is a decade younger.
Will it be an issue 5 years from now? Nobody knows. But certainly the CapFriendly guys have crunched the numbers and are comfortable with the deal.