Waking up Monday a full week past the start of NHL free agency, the off-season seemed very clearly headed into the desert of the off-season when news is sparse and many days are just better designed for taking a small break from Canes hockey to recharge for the next season.
Monday and Tuesday met that expectation, but after that things became interesting and then downright wild.
On Wednesday, the Hurricanes announced a deal that extended Jaccob Slavin and stretched his commitment to a Carolina Hurricanes uniform to eight years counting the one year remaining on his existing contract.
Then just when the Hurricanes hockey community was coming off the high from Wednesday and dialing back down to mid-July hockey nothingness, even bigger news or almost news anyway lit Canes Twitter up like Fourth of July fireworks. In the middle of the afternoon on Thursday, a rumor popped on Twitter saying that the Hurricanes were close to being sold to Chuck Greenberg for something in the neighborhood of $500 million.
Not surprisingly this week’s version of Sunday Canes Chronicle features a heavy dose of Jaccob Slavin, Chuck Greenberg and the possibility of the team being sold.
Jaccob Slavin and his seven-year extension
NHL.com’s NHL Tonight appropriately featuring the owner of the greatest save in Hurricanes history, Kevin Weekes, discussed the Slavin deal and finished with a short video interview with Slavin from his car.
Cory Lavalette from the North State Journal wrote about the Slavin signing including a few quotes from both Jaccob Slavin and Ron Francis.
Andrew Schnittker at NC State’s Technician shared his thoughts on why he thought it was smart for Francis to commit long-term to the young defenseman.
Just919 from Oak City Sports Journal offered a nice statistics-based review of Slavin’s 2016-17 as part of his analysis of Wednesday’s signing.
Matt from CBTS Blog similarly chimed in with a favorable review of the Slavin extension.
Proving that the accolades for the deal are not just locally biased, Ken Campbell from The Hockey News titled his article, “Slavin’s new deal is a steal for up-and-coming Hurricanes.”
If you missed it on Wednesday, you can also find Canes and Coffee’s initial thoughts on the Jaccob Slavin deal.
The Carolina Hurricanes potential sale and Chuck Greenberg
Jeff Gravley at WRALSportsFan.com was the first to break the story formally in the local media and help add early layers of credibility and followed up with a good profile of Greenberg.
Brian LeBlanc at Canes Country provided a detailed chronology with insight to boot on the developing story about a possible Hurricanes sale.
Tom Stephenson at D Magazine out of Dallas offers a dated (2011) but interesting read on Chuck Greenberg’s role in buying the Texas Rangers and his stint with the team that followed.
As far as a simple bio and chronology, Chuck Greenberg’s bio on the ‘About Us’ page for the Myrtle Beach Pelicans team that he owns provides a good summary.
Looking forward after the dust settled on Thursday, Chip Alexander at the News & Observer wrote an article subtitled,“Here are questions that need to be answered.”
Finally, if you missed it on Saturday, our Canes and Coffee ’round 2′ included links to the original rumor sources and did a deeper dive on the whole situation.
With plenty of reading on this week’s two headline stories, we will shelf everything else just in case next week proves to be a more normal quiet hockey week in mid-July. 🙂
Go Canes!
Great links. Especially the Just919 article because that article then links to hockeyviz.
If I am reading the charts correctly, then Brett Pesce is in line for a $5.5M per year contract. Looking at the charts, it shows that Slavin and Pesce are obviously an outstanding pair.
However, the with/without chart shows Slavin moving to the center of the chart while Pesce remains in the “good” quadrant. In fact, for the ENTIRE season Pesce improved each player and Slavin improved each player except Pesce.
The Canes have two outstanding top defensive D-men. The analytics (at least from this one site) indicate that Brett Pesce is marginally better.
I think despite the sway of advanced metrics on the bargaining table, raw stats like points still speak more to contract value than underlying metrics. Therefore I doubt Pesce will receive as much money as Slavin because Slavin has separated himself into another tier point scoring-wise. 30+ pt dmen who are solid defensively (Andrej Sekera types) always pay 5+ million. Pesce has value in that he is right handed, still young (so more to give offensively?), and already excels defensively. The Canes locking him up now for somewhere between 4-5 million seems reasonable, but maybe Pesce and his agent are holding out for a bridge deal or one more season to prove he is worth similar money to Slavin.
Either way, these are good problems to have… Remember the days of Joe Corvo and Tim Gleason as the top pairing?