Flyers get short-term savings with long-term risk by signing Cam York and Noah Cates to bridge deals – Beragampengetahuan

The decisions that the Philadelphia Flyers made with their pending restricted free agents always promised to be more consequential for the club than what little they did at the opening bell of unrestricted free agency.

Less than two weeks into July, general manager Daniel Briere resolved the statuses of two of his three prominent RFAs: Noah Cates and Cam York.

On Monday, the Flyers announced new contracts for both Cates and York, both of the two-year variety. Cates was locked up to a $2.625 million cap hit; York agreed to a deal with a $1.6 million AAV.

The extensions made it clear that the Flyers view the two players as key parts of their present. But by eschewing the long-term route for both, where do they stand in the future?

From the Flyers’ perspective

From a fan perspective, the main question is whether these deals are good for the Flyers, in the sense that they will help the team on the ice.

The answer is technically yes. But also, maybe no.

Both deals are “good,” in the obvious sense that Noah Cates right now can reasonably be expected to provide on-ice value higher than his $2.625 million cap hit, and the same can be said about York. The contracts for the next two years will very likely be surplus value contracts, meaning that they’ll be bargains for the Flyers compared to what players of their skills would make on the open market.

Dom Luszczyszyn’s newest model projects Cates to be worth an average of $4.6 million per year over the length of the deal, meaning that Cates will provide about $2 million in surplus value per season ($1.975 million). York also comes in way under his projected value, with the model seeing him as a $5.1 million-a-year player over the next two seasons. That’s legitimate savings. Over the next two seasons, these will be very good contracts for good NHL players.

But the Flyers almost certainly aren’t going to be good enough to take advantage of that combined $5.475 million in savings. In fact, they’re clearly not even trying to be good enough — after all, they’re allotting a large portion of that savings (as much as $5 million but at least $3.85 million) to carry the Cal Petersen contract for the next two seasons, and we’re talking about a player who was a pure salary cap dump for Los Angeles last month and very well might not be an NHL-caliber netminder anymore.

The Flyers may be saving money on Cates and York now. But that savings will mean little in terms of helping the team to contend for the Stanley Cup, or even the playoffs. So why give them the deals at all?

A look at Cates’ future

Monday’s contract for Cates means that he’ll be up for his next deal at age 26, in the summer of 2025 (he’ll be able to sign an extension as early as July 1, 2024, but it won’t kick in until the 2025-26 season).

When that happens, the Flyers will still have one more year of RFA control over Cates, meaning that he won’t be able to walk right into UFA status. Surely, that was an important part of the deal for the Flyers.

Still, more than anything else, the two-year term plays as a bet on the part of Cates and his camp on themselves.

Cates appears to be very much in line for a big role in Philadelphia over the next two seasons. He’s already endeared himself to head coach John Tortorella. He’s proven he can play both center and wing at an effective level in the NHL. And given his flashes of success on the power play at the end of the 2022-23 season, it’s very possible he could cement himself as an all-situations stalwart for a rebuilding Flyers team that lacks high-end forward options at the top of the lineup. Cates’ defensive work already grades out incredibly well. If his offense improves — whether because he actually becomes a more efficient scorer or because the Flyers simply force-feed him five-on-five and power play minutes — he’ll be primed for a big raise come 2025.

And that will be just when the most optimistic timeframe for the Flyers’ rebuild to “end” will be approaching.

To be clear: it makes perfect sense for Cates to want to sign a two-year deal. The NHL salary cap ceiling is expected to go up dramatically, starting in the 2024-25 season, and only grow further from there — this contract length gives Cates the ability to cash in on the expected spending inflation that will accompany more available money to be spent.

But will it make sense for the Flyers to sign a 26-year-old Cates to that kind of raise come 2025?

It’s certainly possible that he’ll still fit the timeline, especially if the Flyers’ rebuild is progressing at a rapid pace. After all, Cates will still have somewhere between two and four seasons before the aging curve (general rule: players start declining rapidly after they hit 30) really starts to kick in. But a long-term deal at age 26 — which might be required to keep his short-term cap hit reasonable — would also push the contract well into those scary thirties, whereas a long-term deal now would have concluded right when Cates’ age started to get dicey.

So how could this contract work out well for the Flyers? There are two ways.

The first way is if Cates doesn’t break out further and he is what he is — a very good defensive forward without much offensive ability — or even regresses, making the Flyers look clairvoyant for not committing long-term to him just yet. 30-40 point versatile role-playing forwards — even good ones — don’t get paid a ton in terms of cap hit; just ask Scott Laughton about his current five-year, $15 million contract. If Cates doesn’t have another level beyond this, it makes perfect sense to go the bridge route, since he won’t be getting an enormous raise on his next deal anyway.

Second, Cates’ career could play out in Sean Couturier-esque fashion. Couturier also received a bridge deal after the conclusion of his entry-level contract, and hadn’t yet become Sean Couturier when it was approaching its end. That allowed then-GM Ron Hextall to lock Couturier up to a six-year deal with a $4.33 million cap hit on his third contract — a deal that became one of the NHL’s biggest steals when Couturier did finally take that long-awaited offensive step forward.

Basically, the best-case scenario for the Flyers with Cates would be that he’s good the next 1-2 seasons — but better by underlying metrics than the basic box score ones that tend to get players paid.

But the Cates/Couturier comparison isn’t an apples-to-apples one. Couturier was 21 going on 22 when he signed his bridge deal; Cates is 24 going on 25. In other words, Couturier had more development time coming, and the Flyers had more age-related runway to play the waiting game before having to worry about Couturier’s prime running out.

Given Cates’ age, the most likely scenario is that out of the remaining seasons of his career, 2023-24 and 2024-25 will be the years when he provides the most extra value to his club over his actual cap hit, making it a disappointment that those years will be wasted on a club not equipped to take advantage of that savings. But there are still scenarios where he continues to make sense for the Flyers well beyond 2025.

And now, onto Cam York

York’s bridge contract comes with fewer concerns — in large part because of his age.

After all, when York’s deal expires in 2025, he’ll have just turned 24, with three more years of RFA control still looming for him. That’s a big difference compared to Cates, who will be 26 with just one RFA year left.

York, like Cates, has the potential to be in line for a massive raise in 2025. With Ivan Provorov gone, there’s a solid chance he could serve as the Flyers’ de facto No. 1 defenseman very soon — possibly as soon as this upcoming season. That means more ice time, more power play opportunities, and more chances to rack up points.

In 2022-23, York’s underlying metrics at five-on-five were stellar. If they were for real and hold even as York takes on tougher minutes in 2023-24 and 2024-25, York may not be a mere top-four NHL defenseman. He could be a legitimate top-pair quality one. And those types of defensemen justifiably get paid big bucks.

But locking York up to a long-term deal this summer wouldn’t have lacked serious risk.

After all, York could very easily flounder in tougher minutes this season. The Flyers don’t have much in the way of partner help for him on the right side, with Rasmus Ristolainen and Sean Walker probably their two best options. It’s not at all difficult to envision a scenario where the Flyers handed him a six-year contract worth $5-plus million per year this summer and then watched it look foolish as York struggled mightily in a first-pair role with little help around him.

Yes, this summer would have been an opportunity to bet big on York. But York’s camp surely understood the realities of the league’s cap situation as well, and were going to drive a very hard bargain if the Flyers wanted to go long-term. Everyone, after all, knows the cap is going up soon — that includes agents, who aren’t fools.

Also, the Flyers will have another chance to bet on York come next summer, when they’ll first be allowed to sign him to a third contract. And given the fact that he’ll be negotiating off a very low $1.6 million cap hit — meaning that his qualifying offer for 2025-26 will merely have to match it — and that the Flyers will still have three more years of RFA control left, they’ll retain significant negotiating leverage.

If York does take another significant step forward over the next one-to-two seasons, the Flyers will almost certainly have to pay him more on a long-term deal than if the two sides had been able to hammer one out now. But the risk in doing the deal now was higher as well; York has only appeared in 87 NHL games, after all. If that hypothetical deal had gone bad, they could have ended up with a $5 million-per-year third-pair defenseman on their books for the rest of the 2020s.

As with Cates, it’s not ideal that potentially the best value contract years of York will be spent on Flyers teams with little-to-no chance of title contention. But there’s still surplus value potential for the Flyers on York’s next contract — not as much potential as there was now, but with lower risk as well.

A look at the cap situation

So with York and Cates now locked up, where do the Flyers stand cap-wise right now for 2023-24?

At first glance, they’re slammed right up against the ceiling.

But in truth, their situation is nowhere near as tight.

First, Ryan Ellis’ $6.25 million cap can be fully placed on long-term injured reserve if needed, given that it’s a near-certainty that he’s never going to play in the NHL again. Doing so would open up close to his full cap hit in allowance, if needed. Second, the Flyers could clear up somewhere between $291,000 and $375,000 in space by demoting Cal Petersen and replacing him with either Felix Sandström or Sam Ersson as the backup.

And then, there’s the status of Tony DeAngelo.

The fact that the DeAngelo-to-Carolina trade hasn’t happened yet is undeniably odd. The primary holdup was an NHL rule that a player couldn’t be traded back to his previous team for one full calendar year if that second trade involved salary retention, as the original DeAngelo trade did. But the year mark was hit on Saturday, and so far, there’s still been no trade.

At the draft and as recently as early last week, members of both organizations believed that the deal was still going to happen. Hurricanes GM Don Waddell even acknowledged it on the record on July 1, and promised that the deal would happen. It’s tough to see what could be holding it up now, aside from one (or both) teams looking at other potential trade options or the NHL stepping in to prevent it from happening at all.

That said, the Flyers have gone far enough down the road of trying to jettison DeAngelo — retaining 50 percent of his salary to get back a low-level prospect — that one assumes it would be quite difficult to simply welcome him back to a team that clearly no longer wants him around. The fact that Cates filed for arbitration does open up a second buyout window for the Flyers, giving Briere another option if he is truly committed to parting ways with DeAngelo but can’t find a taker if Carolina backs out. Still, my guess is that a trade gets done eventually — meaning that the Flyers would have $2.5 million less on their books for 2023-24.

Remove the Ellis contract as well, and suddenly, the Flyers have quite a lot of cap space left to re-sign Morgan Frost.

The Flyers, in other words, still have more than enough functional space available to re-sign Frost to even a long-term extension, while still serving as a landing spot for a bad contract or two from a team looking to clear up cap space of their own.

That would be one way to take long-term advantage of the cap space that was saved by going with bridge deals for Cates and York instead of more expensive long-term contracts. We’ll see if Briere can do it.

(Top photo of Noah Cates, Morgan Frost and Cam York: Derik Hamilton / AP Photo)