Neutral-Zone Crap: $10 Million Man Meier highlights trade deadline
The Sharks winger got creative with his contract, but that shouldn't scare away teams that think they're one forward away from contending...Plus, Donald Brashear, the PHF and Situational Scoring
You certainly have to hand it to Timo Meier and his agent, former NHL super pest Claude Lemieux, for the creativity they displayed when they negotiated Meier’s four-year, $24 million deal with the San Jose Sharks in the summer of 2019. Meier was 22 and coming off a season in which he scored 30 goals, so you knew he was going to get paid.
But Meier eschewed the common practice of having his contract front-loaded and instead opted to have it back-loaded. With an average annual salary of $6 million, Meier set the salary at $4 million for each of the first two years of the deal and $6 million last season. That gave him a salary of $10 million for this season, which means that the Sharks, or the team he ends up with after the trade deadline, must tender him a qualifying offer of a one-year deal at $10 million in order to retain his rights. The NHL dislikes deals such as this one so much that when it renegotiated the collective bargaining agreement coming out of the pandemic, it came to an agreement that qualifying offers for future deals can now be no more than 120 percent of the AAV of the contract. In Meier’s case, that’s a difference of getting an offer of $7.2 million under the new system compared to the $10 million he’ll be offered this summer.
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