Philadelphia Flyers: Sean Couturier's New Contract

While we know Jake Voracek will get a hefty raise when he signs his new contract, what Sean Couturier and Brayden Schenn—both of whom become restricted free agents next offseason—can expect to get paid is still anyone’s guess.

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Couturier will be in the last year of a contract extension signed in 2013 which paid him $1.5 million in 2014-2015 and will pay him $2 million in the upcoming 2015-2016 season. In this article I’ll be taking a look at players with outputs similar to Couturier (Schenn will come later) to see if we can speculate what his new contract may look like.

First, let’s look at Couturier’s stats with the Flyers since his contract extension in 2013, per War on Ice:

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To get an idea of where to start, I looked for players who put up similar numbers to Couturier since he signed his extension:

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There were players I originally included that I decided to take out (Kesler, Brouwer, Kuznetsov), but of these eight players, I suspected the ones in bold would be closest to Couturier.

It’s important to keep in mind that a two-way forward like Couturier isn’t likely to get paid solely on his offensive output, so I broke down the comparisons even further with advanced statistics, once again from War on Ice:

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This is what we’re looking at, from the War on Ice glossary:

CF% measures the percentage of on-ice shot attempts (on goal, missed, or blocked).
CF% Rel measures the player’s on-ice Corsi% minus the player’s off-ice Corsi%; off-ice Corsi% is the percent of shot attempts taken by the player’s team when the player is not on the ice (but in games where the player is in the lineup).
FF% measures the percentage of unblocked on-ice shot attempts (on goal or missed) taken by the player’s team.
PDO is the sum of a player’s on-ice shooting percentage and on-ice save percentage.
ZSO% Rel is the fraction of offensive zone starts versus defensive zone starts.
TOI/Game is the player’s average time on ice per game.

The idea behind this wasn’t to see who the best player was out of the four. Instead, I wanted to find the player whose statistics best matched Couturier’s so I could get an idea of what a similar player has been paid.

As I stated above, Couturier’s value is in his defensive game, which none of the above players really came close to matching. Looking at Couturier’s ZSO% Rel alone gives you an idea of how coaches have been using him, and that can be summed up in one word: defensively. Couturier starts in the d-zone a lot. Broad Street Hockey’s Travis Hughes summed it up quite nicely back in April.

Finally, now that we’ve got our comparable players, let’s talk contracts. For the seasons detailed above, here’s what each player was paid:

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Two things are worth noting here: 1) Hagelin is a restricted free agent this offseason and has yet to sign a new contract; and 2) Frolik signed a 5-year, $4.3 million AAV deal with Calgary earlier this month.

So, here’s the million-dollar question: Using these numbers as reference, what can we expect Couturier’s new contract to look like?

While I certainly don’t expect him to get anywhere near Jordan Staal’s money, I wouldn’t be surprised (or disappointed) if it was somewhere between Frolik’s old and new contracts. Couturier will only be 23 by the time he signs his next deal, so I’d imagine Hextall, who seems extremely fond of the youth movement, will want to eat up the rest of his RFA years on a cap-friendly deal.

If I had to guess, I would say Couturier’s new deal might be 5 years/$3.8-4 million AAV.

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