Gear: Why it’s risky for college players to burn entry-level contract years
To burn or not to burn, that is the question. For NCAA hockey players looking to leave college and embark on pro careers, and for the clubs that drafted them or are looking to land them in free agency, the answer to that question can have big implications for years to come.
With the NCAA season winding down, we are about to see the next crop of college players make the leap to the NHL. Every year, college players who finish their seasons before the NHL season ends become eligible to sign NHL contracts. In some cases, those players have played out their full college eligibility. In other cases, they are ready to leave school early to turn pro. In either scenario, the rules of the NHL’s collective bargaining agreement make the timing of a signing a very significant decision for both player and club.
First, some background. A player who signs his first contract between the ages of 18 and 21 is subject to the league’s entry-level system for three seasons. A player who signs his first contract at 22 or 23 years of age is subject to the entry-level system for two years, and a player who signs at 24 is an entry-level player for one year. Age is determined at Sept. 15 of the signing year for all players.
Entry-level players are only eligible to earn a certain level of compensation during those contract years. Leaving aside performance bonuses (a topic that deserves a separate article), the CBA has set $832,500 USD as the maximum salary, and $92,500 USD as the maximum yearly signing bonus a player on his entry level contract can earn.
So what does this have to do with players leaving college to turn pro?
College players and teams have the option to sign “future contracts” which will take effect at the commencement of the next league year or a “current contract” that is effective immediately. A current contract will use up, or “burn,” the first year of the player’s entry-level deal, even if the player plays in just a single game that season.
A player doesn’t accrue a completed season for the purposes of free agency, salary arbitration eligibility or expansion protection until he has played 10 games in a season, but for the purpose of burning a year of the ELC, one game is all it takes.
At first glance, it appears players have a massive incentive to burn their first entry-level year in order to get to their second contract (where they will have restricted free agent status) as fast as possible. A player can be paid a full-year’s signing bonus for playing that one game (or a few games) in April or May and then get another full year’s signing bonus payment as soon as July 1 of that same year. That’s up to $185,000 in less than four months, big money for a kid coming out of college. He will also be a year closer to a potential large pay day as a restricted free agent.
Conversely, teams generally want the cost control associated with players staying on entry-level deals for as long as possible. It is always a risk for a club to allow a player with star potential to burn a year, forcing the club into a situation where it may need to pay the player significantly increased compensation (and incur a higher cap hit) a year earlier than necessary.
Sometimes, though, it plays out differently.
For every Brock Boeser that burns a year and jumps early to a contract worth $5.875 million per year instead of $925,000 per year, there is a Griffen Molino.
Molino was one of the first players I submitted a contract for during my tenure with the Vancouver Canucks. At the time, he was a free-agent college forward who could skate like the wind. Our scouts stated he must have had a pair of wings under his jersey the way he could fly. After two productive seasons at Western Michigan University, Molino wanted to turn pro, and several teams were rumored to be interested in his services. The Canucks were willing to burn a year in order to be the winning suitor in the free agency sweepstakes.
As a 22-year-old for signing purposes, Molino was only subject to a two-year, entry-level contract, and by burning a year, he effectively had only one year in the entry-level system. That meant only one year of development with the team before the organization would have to make a decision on him as a restricted free agent. He played for the Canucks in the last five games of the 2016-17 season (i.e. the burned year) and looked promising, but after some struggles in 2017-18 in the AHL, he was not given a qualifying offer and he left the organization. He would go on to play a few more seasons of professional hockey on American Hockey League contracts.
There is no way of knowing whether Molino’s career path would have been different had he signed a future contract giving him two years of development time within the organization instead of the one year, but I have always wondered if things might have worked out differently for him, or for players like him.
Often times, an extra year of entry-level development can help with a player’s physical and mental maturity as well as his confidence. Teams also invest more in a player’s growth, playing time and off-season training if there is more runway to work with. For those players and teams who agreed to burn a year and then didn’t go on to sign another contract, we’ll never know if that decision was a pivotal turning point in the player’s career or the team’s opportunity. I suspect it often was.
One thing we do know is that so long as players want to burn, there is a CBA rule that puts them squarely in the driver’s seat when it comes to that decision. The CBA provides that a college player who remains unsigned as at Aug. 15 following their fourth year of college eligibility automatically becomes an unrestricted free agent. This is the rule that allowed players such as Kevin Hayes, Jimmy Vesey, Alexander Kerfoot and Will Butcher to avoid signing with the teams that drafted them and instead sign with another team of their choosing.
No team wants to lose the rights to their draft pick in such a manner, so when a player requests to burn a year, teams often acquiesce, even if no overt threat to use the college free-agent loophole has been made. That potential is always lurking in the background. Unless and until the rule changes, we will continue to see players trying to get out of the entry-level system faster and teams letting it happen.
Some players will benefit massively from the decision to burn and get paid early – the big second contracts for defensemen Cale Makar of the Avalanche and Quinn Hughes of the Canucks come to mind. Players not of that stature should probably beware the false promise of the contract burn. They just may end up being the ones burned.
____
Chris Gear joined Daily Faceoff in January after a 12-year run with the Vancouver Canucks, most recently as the club’s Assistant General Manager and Chief Legal Officer. Before migrating over to the hockey operations department, where his responsibilities included contract negotiations, CBA compliance, assisting with roster and salary cap management and governance for the AHL franchise, Gear was the Canucks’ vice president and general counsel.
Click here to read Gear’s other Daily Faceoff stories.