Blake Wheeler Showed Up For Work This Morning After Labor Day Weekend And Got A $41.25M Paycheck
Imagine that. The Tuesday after Labor Day Weekend. You just went as hard as possible for the past 72 hours trying to salvage the last remaining moments of your summer. You drank too much. You ate too much. You spent too much time out in the sun. It was worth it, don’t get me wrong. But chances are you showed up for work this morning and as soon as you sat down at your desk, death seemed like an at least reasonable request from you.
Meanwhile Blake Wheeler woke up this morning and now he’s getting paid $8.25M per year for the next 5 years at the start of next summer. Not a bad way to cap off a season where he had 91 points and led the Winnipeg Jets to the Western Conference Finals for the first time in franchise history both in the original Winnipeg Jets era and the new Atlanta era. He’s been in Winnipeg during the entirety of Jets 2.0 era, had 68 apples last year, wears the ‘C’ and had the team just a few wins away from making it to the Stanley Cup Final. I think Blake Wheeler has earned every penny of this new contract. But this was the easy part for the Winnipeg Jets. Here’s where things start to get a little dicey.
Scheifele is locked in long term so that’s good. Ehlers is locked in long term so that’s good. And then Wheeler’s extension kicks in after this year where he’s still making $5.6M. The Jets have a little more than $10M in cap space as it stands right now but a few million from that gets shaved off once Wheeler’s new contract goes on the books. Along with Wheeler’s new contract next season, you’ll also have to add whatever Patrik Laine ends up coming away with in his first post-ELC deal. You look at what young talent in this league is hauling in these days. Obviously Connor McDavid sets the pace at $12.5M. Jack Eichel is making $10M. Patrik Laine always says that he’s focused on being the best player in the league. I think he’s smart enough to realize that he can’t go out looking for $12M and leave the Jets in a position to build a team to really support him even with those top guys already locked in for the long haul. Especially when the future of the blueline is still so uncertain.
Jacob Trouba was awarded a 1-year/$5.5M deal this summer in arbitration. Tyler Myers is also making that same money with only a year left on his deal before he hits the open market. You have to imagine that if the Jets are going to give Laine the money that he’s worth, one of those guys probably won’t be around after this year. Trouba has already had plenty of contract issues with Winnipeg before. He sat out of training camp at the beginning of 2016-17 before signing a 2-year deal. Now he just went through arbitration for this current contract. He’ll probably end up filing for arbitration next summer as well and who knows if the Jets will be able to handle that. So no matter what, the Winnipeg Jets are going to have Mark Scheifele, Blake Wheeler, Patrik Laine, Nikolaj Ehlers, Dustin Byfuglien and Connor Hellebuyck for the next few seasons. That’s huge. You can win with that group. But the next few contracts the Jets hand out are all going to come down to how much they’re giving Patrik Laine and who they’re willing to part ways with in order to make that happen. So I guess you can say that Kevin Cheveldayoff won’t be taking a… DAY OFF… any time soon. Get it? Because “day off” is in his last name and he’s going to be really busy trying to get everybody signed for next season. That’s comedy, boys and girls.
P.S. – These are all very good issues for the Winnipeg Jets to be having. It’s a lot better for a team to have to worry about which really really good hockey players they can afford to keep around and which ones they have to get rid of. As opposed to teams like the Arizona Coyotes who have to worry about which hockey player with a giant cap hit who hasn’t played in 3 seasons they can sign to hit the cap floor. So don’t cry for Winnipeg that they’re going to find themselves in cap hell very soon. I think they’ll be just fine.