Gaudreau, Trouba and the World Cup-bound unsigned RFAs (Trending Topics)

At this point, there are only a little more than a dozen unsigned restricted free agents in the NHL. A few of them are marginal NHL players who teams should try to re-sign, but it’s not like they’re going to make or break their clubs.

However, there are more than a few of them who are legitimately big names that you’d have really thought would be signed right now. And more worrisome for their teams is — or at least should be — the fact that a lot of them are playing in the World Cup of Hockey.

Calgary’s Johnny Gaudreau and Winnipeg’s Jacob Trouba are probably the most obvious of these, because they’re good enough to both be playing in the World Cup of Hockey for the 23-U team. But Buffalo’s Rasmus Ristolainen is suiting up for Finland. Anaheim’s Rickard Rakell and Hampus Lindholm were both recently added to Sweden’s World Cup roster as injury replacements (for Alex Steen and Nik Kronwall, respectively). Tampa’s Nikita Kucherov and Washington’s Dmitry Orlov will play for Russia.

For most of these guys, it’s been revealed in the past few weeks that they’re fully planning to participate in the World Cup, contract or no, and that can really make things interesting. Not only because hey, you never know, they could get injured. But what if Gaudreau gets on a line with Connor McDavid and torches the World Cup for seven points in four games or something? What if Lindholm turns out to be a huge difference-maker on the Sweden blue line? What if Kucherov is only mediocre on a not-very-good Russian team?

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The potential impact of that small sample of games on negotiations could be sizable, if we’re being honest. Yeah, maybe (definitely) you shouldn’t put too much stock into the goings-on of a September tournament in which the most active player will play a maximum of, what, five games? But we’ve seen countless times that guys can ride strong playoff performances to bigger contracts than they reasonably deserve; Ville Leino being the prime example.

Now, this obviously isn’t the Stanley Cup playoffs, but let’s not pretend that a world-class performance in an international tournament isn’t enough to get you overrated; Ryan Miller rode a stunning Olympic performance to a Vezina despite being only pretty-good after getting back (.935 from October to January, .946 in Vancouver, .916 post-Olympics).

The idea that so many teams would enter a “major” international tournament with this kind of uncertainty hanging over some of their better players is a little surprising. The good news is they’ll get some reps in against top talent so even if they miss some of training camp, it won’t be a big deal. And yeah, the season’s starting later than usual. But these are mostly guys you simply need to have under contract. Have we ever seen an unsigned RFA class this big or talented? I mean, 15 guys on Sept. 2 seems like a lot, right? Especially with more than one All-Star in the mix.

You’d have thought that this wasn’t the kind of risk either team or player would be willing to make, but the fact is that players face far less risk from a bad World Cup performance than teams face when it comes to a potentially very good one. For the most part, these are players who can take over a game from time to time — Gaudreau or Kucherov more frequently than Ristolainen or Orlov, admittedly — but we’ve all seen players go on absurd five-game runs in which they cannot be stopped. Phil Kessel at the last Olympics is a perfect example: he went 5-3-8 in six games and led the tournament in both goals and points against the absolute best players in the world. No one would ever mistake him for a player that dominant, merely a very talented guy who can have the occasional incredible game. Most of the players listed above have that kind of game-breaking talent as well.

Just to use the Gaudreau situation as an example: The apparent hang-up in his negotiations with the Flames is term. He probably wants a shorter-term deal so he can lock in an even more impressive contract three or four years from now when the cap is presumably going to be higher. In a universe that bends more fairly to the team (and believe that it already does so to a considerable extent), the Flames would just give him $8 million AAV for the next eight seasons and worry about everything else later.

Gaudreau absolutely has the talent level and opportunity to be the MVP of this tournament if he gets a few bounces, and if that’s the case the Flames might have no choice but to acquiesce to whatever his contract demands end up being. Things could also go the other way and he somehow isn’t very good, but then he just points to his 54 goals and 142 points over the last two seasons and says “pay me.”

The same is true of Lindholm, who was one of the best defenders in hockey last year. The same is true of Kucherov, who at times in the postseason looked like the best player on the ice on any given night. These are guys who are a few breaks away from costing their teams a whole crapload of money, not that they might be able to reasonably afford them. Anaheim has to be getting close to its internal budget limit, Gaudreau’s likely to push the Flames close to the ceiling or even forcing a transaction. Tampa will almost certainly have to make a move to get Kucherov back in the fold. Anything that increases the dollar values for these players is not a good thing for their clubs. It’s difficult to understand how the GMs let things get this far, to be honest.

On the other hand, there’s also reason to suspect that for some of these guys, teams might just be a little more on the fence. What is Trouba to the Jets, really? Is he their third-best defenseman? What’s that worth to them given his age and a number of other factors? And how does that mesh with their internal budget? Trouba’s name has been thrown around in trade rumors all summer both because he’s unsigned and because it seems everyone outside of Winnipeg is higher on him than his own team.

Ristolainen is in much the same boat. There’s plenty of evidence to indicate he’s not all that good, but every time you hear someone talk about him, it’s “He’s a future No. 1 defenseman,” or “He’s already a top-pairing defenseman.” Neither of those things strike an observer based outside of the greater Buffalo area as being particularly true, but if that’s how player and agent see things — hard not to buy your own hype, eh? — then that explains the disconnect between what they seek and what the team would offer.

And the odds that Orlov, Trouba, or Ristolainen, or even Rakell — a forward who’s a fair bit better than any of those three young defenders in terms of observable impact on the game — are the best players on their team is significantly diminished in comparison with the other unsigned RFAs. For those guys, there’s still a risk to the team, but it seems more injury-related than performance-based. And that one would have been there whether they signed in July or the day before the World Cup.

There’s so much at risk for teams here, in a way no GM has ever really had to deal with before. There’s never been a World Cup in a real salary cap league. The NHL announced the 2004-05 lockout two days after the last World Cup ended. Few GMs likely looked to open negotiations days after the Olympics came to an end, and none did so in the hopes they could get one of their best players to get back under contract before league play resumed.

I’m not sure how a guy like Brad Treliving or Bob Murray watches this tournament with his stomach anywhere but in his throat. I’m not sure how things were allowed to drag on this long.

Ryan Lambert is a Puck Daddy columnist. His email is here and his Twitter is here.