Unless you’re a fan of the team or a hockey nerd, when you got a notification on your phone or saw the news that Mattias Samuelsson of the Buffalo Sabres and Mikey Anderson of the Los Angeles Kings were signed to respective seven and eight-year extensions, you probably were wondering why they got that kind of term. You were may have even wondering who they were.
That balance continued into the 2010s, but the game became a lot faster and a lot smarter, so the defensive defenseman adapted to that stay-at-home presence that you paired with your offensive defenseman so that they could jump up into the rush. The puck-mover had that rock behind him that would provide some coverage in case things went wrong.
But like the defensemen in my previous article, the market hadn’t quite found a way to capitalize on the best years for these types of defenders, often not even recognizing their contributions until well after the fact, and then paying them for it in their 30s when their best years are behind them and their bodies have slowed them down. Until now.
With how hard it is to evaluate defensive defensemen, getting guys who are good at this aspect of the game locked up for cheap in their primes not only guarantees having them, but you also don’t run the risk of getting someone who appears to be good at it, but isn’t, and locking them up to significantly worse contracts in their older years.
For Samuelsson, the Sabres have a window of the next three seasons where they can buy him out with a cap hit of under $800,000 remaining, and for Anderson, it’s the next two seasons where it’s $700,000 or less. Even if they want to do it after that, their buyout cap hits fall to around $1.4 million, which isn’t ideal but far from the worst case.
When I took a look at similarity scores from Evolving Hockey for Mikey Anderson’s 2019-22 seasons , his closest comparable that also played during those seasons was Andrew Peeke, a defenseman who’s played a similar role with the Columbus Blue Jackets. Unfortunately, the Blue Jackets did not make that bet, and instead opted to bridge him until he was 27 at a $2.75 million cap hit, so there goes that example.