Brent Burns not ‘slam dunk’ to stay with San Jose Sharks

San Jose Sharks defenseman Brent Burns is doing the Brent Burns thing again this season: 10 points in his first nine games, two of them on the power play, with 45 shots on goal to lead all players.

At 31 years old, it’s the kind of performance we’ve come to expect from one of the NHL’s top offensive defensemen. It’s also the kind of performance we know is going to earn him exponentially more than his $5.760 million cap hit in his next contract, as a pending unrestricted free agent.

Question is, who gives it to him?

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Elliotte Friedman reported that that there isn’t a freeze on the negotiations between the Sharks and Burns in-season, so talks on a contract can continue while the Sharks defend their Western Conference title. By all accounts he wants to stay in San Jose, but this isn’t going to be a simple negotiation.

From TSN’s Bob McKenzie, via Chris Nichols:

“I think in many ways he wants to be back in San Jose. If Joe’s signed up, and they’ve got their core with Couture, Pavelski, and Hertl and some of those guys – Vlasic – there’s an excellent chance he could be back. It’s just a matter of him and his agent having to figure out how they’re going to make the contract work so that the team – that core – can stay together.

“But the flip side of that is he easily could have signed, like Brad Marchand, this summer – an extension with San Jose – and he didn’t. And they never really got appreciable talks going in terms of crunching numbers back and forth and trading proposals. So what that tells me is that he’s at least keeping a little bit of an open mind here to see how the season goes before he makes any commitments. So I can’t sit here and tell you, by any stretch, that he won’t be back with San Jose next year. But I would also caution and say that we shouldn’t assume that it’s an absolute slam-dunk that he will be back with San Jose.”

We spoke with a few people around the Sharks when they were in New York recently, and got the same vibe: Mutual interest in keeping Burns with San Jose, but with some caution on both sides of the table.

It’s not a matter of cap space for the Sharks. This is likely the end of the line for Patrick Marleau with the team, at least at $6.67 million, so they’ll pick up money there. Both Joe Pavelski and Logan Couture are up in 2020, and Tomas Hertl goes RFA in 2019, but that’s it for huge ticket players.

For comparables, Dustin Byfuglien was given $7.6 million against the cap on a five-year term. The Sharks could go lower with Burns if they give him more years, but he’ll turn 32 next March. Assuming this new deal has no-move protection, the Sharks could be looking down the barrel of a 36-year-old defenseman making over $7 million against the cap in four years; the question is whether that’s worth it for the window to win in those four years the Sharks clearly have.

But then you get to the X-factors, which are the external forces: Teams looking for that mobile, point-producing defenseman that the League covets like Gollum and the One Ring. (“Oliver Ekman-Larsson … myyyyy preciousssssss.”)

You already have Bob Stauffer making noise in Edmonton about The McDavid Effect drawing Burns to the Oilers, which could eventually spell the end of Ryan Nugent-Hopkins with the Oilers, considering the McDavid contract is looming in 2019. (Though perhaps not immediately, given their cap flexibility next season.)

Other teams will line up for him, too, with big money offers. So we come back to the basic questions for Brent Burns and the Sharks that we arrive at for most key UFAs: Will comfort and less money win over temptation and more money; and how rich and how long are the Sharks willing to go with a late-blooming defensive star?

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Greg Wyshynski is a writer for Yahoo Sports. Contact him at puckdaddyblog@yahoo.com or find him on Twitter. His book, TAKE YOUR EYE OFF THE PUCK, is available on Amazon and wherever books are sold.

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