Has the Ondrej Palat contract been THAT bad?

Palat has been a polarizing figure amongst Devils fans but there’s more to hockey than just scoring goals.

Two summers ago, the New Jersey Devils were looking to make yet another splash in free agency. And why not? Twelve months earlier, they convinced Dougie Hamilton to come to New Jersey. The Devils, despite having a down year in 2021-22, were viewed as a team on the cusp of turning the corner and being a really good hockey team, if only they could get the right supporting pieces around their young core. They had cap space to play with at the time, thanks in part to the team-friendly deals that Nico Hischier and Jack Hughes had already signed, as well as with PK Subban’s $9M AAV contract expiring. And their younger high-end prospects were years away from contributing anything at the NHL level. The time to go for it and spend money is now!

The Devils went big game hunting and tried to land the best forward on the open market that summer in Johnny Gaudreau. But they were unsuccessful in their efforts as Gaudreau opted to sign in Columbus. So they pivoted, opting to sign a different free agent forward in Ondrej Palat to a five-year, $30M deal ($6M AAV).

John wrote about his concerns with that deal at the time and how it very much felt like a “Plan B” at best and a panic signing after missing out on Gaudreau at worst. I was a little more optimistic on Palat when I profiled him during the lead up to free agency, although admittedly, he was not my first choice. I wanted Gaudreau as much as the next guy at the time, but I also had interest in other players I profiled like Mason Marchment who has been great since signing in Dallas as a free agent.

Generally speaking though, I think I’m a little more optimistic on Palat than most Devils fans, who view that deal as something of a disaster. At least if Twitter/X is any indicator….

The comments on that embedded tweet above are interesting, because for every one person who thinks like me that say “It’s fine”, there’s the other extreme with people saying its the worst contract the Devils have ever handed a player.

I think that viewpoint is a bit much, even though the early returns on Palat haven’t been great. Dom Luszczyszyn from The Athletic would agree as Palat was nowhere near his list of Top 10 worst contracts in the NHL when he published his column last week.

I’m old enough to remember the Devils attaching a first round pick to dump Vladimir Malakhov’s contract. Does Anton Volchenkov ring a bell to anyone? How about Brian Rolston when he came back? Or pretty much every contract the Devils handed to anyone not named Jaromir Jagr between July 4, 2012 (the day Zach Parise signed in Minnesota) and when Ray Shero took over as GM on May 6, 2015? From Mike Cammalleri to Ryane Clowe to the final NHL contracts that Bryce Salvador and Dainius Zubrus signed in New Jersey, there’s some doozies there. And if we really want to talk about bad contracts that might have hampered the Devils ability to do things, there’s a conversation to be had about Ilya Kovalchuk and the alternate universe where he plays out his entire deal in New Jersey and how that might have impacted the team had he lasted in the league this long.

With 54 points in 120 career games as a Devil through his first two seasons, I think the Palat contract can be deemed “ok, but its an overpay” on its best days and “woof, that deal stinks out loud” on its worst. But two years into that deal, I think a fair question to ask is whether or not the Palat deal has actually been THAT bad?

Why the Palat Deal Might be Worth It, and Why It Might Not Be Worth It

I go back to a line that I wrote when I profiled Palat heading into free agency.

“Ondrej Palat is a winner. The Devils have been perennial losers for most of the last decade, so they should be very interested in someone like Palat to try to help them become perennial winners.”

Fitzgerald echoed similar sentiments when he met the media two years ago after the signing was made official.

“We targeted Ondrej right from the get go because of the characteristics we valued in a player like that….what he can bring to the table and help us really have our young players understand what it takes to not only get in the playoffs but what it takes to battle through. Round by round by round. Trust me, he was at the top….right up there at the top of our list because of the things we wanted to bring in.”

It’s important to keep in mind where the Devils were on their timeline when they made that signing. Jack Hughes (21 years old at the time), Nico Hischier (23), Jesper Bratt (23), and Dawson Mercer (20) were already on the roster, with Luke Hughes, Simon Nemec, and Alexander Holtz on the way. It is not easy to win in the NHL with a roster of people who are literally children making up most of it. Even really talented children. Fitzgerald knows this, which is why he added veterans that offseason like Erik Haula and Brendan Smith along with Palat. It’s why he’s still adding veterans today with the additions of Brett Pesce, Brenden Dillon, Stefan Noesen, and Tomas Tatar.

Obviously, I’m delving into the territory of “we don’t know what we don’t know”. We don’t know what kind of leader Palat has been behind closed doors. We do know that for basically every game he has been healthy, he has worn an ‘A’ on his sweater. He’s clearly one of the leaders on the team and an important locker room figure when it comes to showing the team how to be professionals. And I’m not saying that Palat is solely responsible for the team turning things around two years ago, but I do think that stuff matters. Having adults in the room and having professionals in the room matters. Whether you think that is worth $6M AAV for five seasons, well, your mileage may vary. But I don’t think Tom Fitzgerald regrets whatever impact Palat has presumably made in the room. I don’t think Nico Hischier and Jack Hughes and any of the other young players on the Devils lack an appreciation for what Palat provides.

You need to do more than that though. You need to come through in big games as well if you’re going to sign a player who has a reputation for coming through in big games.

Does seven points in 12 playoff games in the spring of 2023 do anything for you?

Of course, this raises the question of “If Palat was such a great leader, why did the Devils play so poorly last year?” “Why did there appear to be a void in leadership and accountability?” “Why did the Devils miss the playoffs?” “Why didn’t Palat do more in games that mattered down the stretch?”

I don’t have great answers to those questions, but I will say that I do think blaming Palat for the team’s shortcomings last season is like complaining about your steak being overcooked while the Titanic is sinking. Yeah, it stinks. That said, there’s bigger issues at hand here, folks. Of course you want more than 11 goals and 20 assists in 71 games from your $6M winger. I also don’t think that critics of Palat’s deal are going to change their tune much if he has 41 points last year instead of 31, or if his AAV was $5.5M instead of $6M. Yes, Palat had a bad year. A lot of Devils had a bad year. We’ll see if he does better under a new coaching staff and with better defensemen and goaltending behind him.

It’s fair to point out that Palat had a lot of wear and tear on the tires when the Devils signed him in the first place. 628 regular season games over 10 years in Tampa, along with another 138 postseason games in Tampa. All before he signed in New Jersey. That’s a lot of hockey, particularly when considering how much of a toll playoff hockey takes on a player. I think its also fair to point out that he’s entering his age 33 season, he’s missed time due to injuries the last two years, and generally speaking, players don’t improve as they enter their mid 30s. These were all concerns that were pointed out when the deal was signed in the first place.

Still, I think there are reasons to be optimistic. His CF% and xG% numbers have been better the last two years in NJ than they were for most of his run in Tampa. Perhaps that’s a byproduct of playing with Nico Hischier and Jesper Bratt as much as he has the last two seasons, as they’ve been his most frequent linemates, but Palat has always been a player who has shown he can play with good players dating back to his days in Tampa. Palat’s shots/60 and shot attempts/60 are down from his time in Tampa, so perhaps he could stand to be a little more selfish when the puck is on his stick and rip it more frequently. Palat would be far from the first Devils player who could stand to get the puck on net more rather than make the extra pass. But his points/60 at 5v5 isn’t down all that much. Palat was typically around 1.8 and 1.9 at 5v5 over the last half decade before coming to NJ but that has dipped to 1.6 the last two years. It should also be noted that Palat has drawn more defensive zone starts during the last two years than he had throughout his career in Tampa (44.6% in NJ vs 41.3% in TB). Perhaps his offensive stats would be better if he was getting more offensive zone starts and/or the team wasn’t leaning on him as much as they were defensively.

I don’t know how Sheldon Keefe plans to utilize Palat but seeing as a lot of Palat’s strengths as a player are more of the complimentary type and of a “doing the little things” type, it would not surprise me to see him in a Top Six role. Perhaps with better injury luck and less team dysfunction, he can do more with the counting stats to make his contract a little more tolerable.

Has Palat’s Contract Kept the Devils From Making Other Moves?

I don’t think anyone doubts that Palat is a good complimentary player, but this is another instance where this is a case of “yeah, he’s fine, but is he worth $6M for three more years”. And that leads into the next critique people tend to have, which is how that money could be better utilized elsewhere.

But has Palat’s contract actually stopped the Devils from doing things?

This again falls under the umbrella of “we don’t know what we don’t know” and alternate timelines that we can’t know with certainty.

Seeing as the Devils had a really good season in 2022-23, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that no, Palat’s deal didn’t stop the Devils from doing anything that year. It didn’t stop the Devils from going out and trading for Timo Meier at the deadline, unless you want to make a big deal about 50% of Meier’s salary being retained by the Sharks for the rest of that season. But I could point out how Andreas Johnsson was a bigger waste of money, spent almost the entire season in the AHL, and had to go the other way to San Jose to make that math work on that deal.

Did the Palat deal stop the Devils from doing anything last summer? I don’t think so, considering they weren’t going to keep Ryan Graves, Damon Severson, or Miles Wood regardless. And even if they wanted to….do you want any part of the contracts they wound up signing? I don’t. Graves and Severson might have two of the worst defensemen contracts in the league once you get past the obvious candidates like Darnell Nurse, and Miles Wood’s contract will still be ongoing through the next US Presidential Election….in 2028. Palat also didn’t stop the Devils from taking a shot on Tyler Toffoli as a one-year rental. Palat’s deal wasn’t what stopped the Devils from running it back with Vitek Vanecek and Akira Schmid in net. It also wasn’t what kept Tom Fitzgerald from mostly sitting on his hands as the season spiraled out of control. That’s on the GM.

Fast forward to this summer. Did the Palat deal stop the Devils from signing Pesce, Dillon, Noesen, or Tatar? No, it did not. And yes, Fitzgerald had to do a little extra legwork to create some space just to fit those guys in. They needed Calgary and Montreal to retain salary on their goaltenders, in part because they were up against the cap. Palat is a part of that. But players like Kevin Bahl, John Marino, Alexander Holtz, Akira Schmid, and Brendan Smith were ultimately deemed expendable and were either traded away or allowed to leave in free agency. Maybe Palat’s deal cost them a chance at signing Jonathan Marchessault, a player the Devils were very much interested in on July 1. But considering Marchessault is currently older than Palat by 92 days and needed a five-year deal to sign in Nashville, I’m not sure that’s the hill I want to die on when talking about players the Devils might have missed out on. Marchessault got an excellent deal for him in a tax-free, warm-weather, well-regarded city like Nashville. Good on him. He’s a great player. But that’s not on Palat.

But what if Palat’s deal will keep the Devils from resigning Luke Hughes or Simon Nemec or Dawson Mercer when the time comes?

Spoiler alert. It won’t.

According to Puckpedia, the Devils are projected to have $15,306,667 in cap space next offseason and $24,275,000 the following year. That’s not including any future salary cap ceiling increases either, so those numbers are likely to be closer to $19.8M next summer and maybe $31-32M the following year, depending upon how much the cap does go up. The NHL CBA is set to expire after the 2025-26 season so we’ll see whether or not the cap continues to grow from that point forward.

Yes, Mercer needs a new deal this summer, but what he gets is independent of Palat’s situation, and Mercer will only have himself to blame when he accepts a bridge deal rather than sign a more lucrative long-term deal. Perhaps if Mercer had a better year in 2023-24, he would be getting a long-term deal, but that seems unlikely now.

Yes, Luke Hughes will probably get a deal that starts with an $8M AAV but these are things the Devils have already planned for. I don’t know what Nemec is ultimately going to get two years from now, but I am pretty confident in saying that Fitzgerald isn’t stupid enough to lose Nemec because there’s a year left on Palat’s deal when he’s 35.

While I understand that “you can get out of this deal with a year or two years left” isn’t exactly a ringing endorsement of whether or not said deal is a good one in the first place, NHL teams find ways to get out of less than ideal contracts all the time. Does anyone really doubt that the Devils will be able to find a way out of Palat’s deal when the time comes?

So no, Palat’s deal probably hasn’t kept the Devils from doing anything they wanted to do. Not unless you think this team needed a more one-dimensional type like Vlad Tarasenko. If Palat being on the roster kept the Devils from doing that, I think I’m ok with that.

The Salary Cap Increasing Makes Bad Contracts More Tolerable And Good Contracts Great

I’ve been saying this for awhile now and I think this is a good spot to hammer home this point, but with the salary cap only continuing to increase, I think we as hockey fans should be looking at what percentage of the cap a player’s contract is taking up versus how much money the player is making on an AAV.

When Palat signed his deal, the NHL salary cap ceiling had just increased for the first time in three seasons, thanks in part to COVID-19’s impact on hockey related revenues (HRR) and the amount of escrow the players was paying. Now that the pandemic is behind us, business is as good as ever with HRR through the roof, and the escrow has been paid off, the era of the flat cap appears to be over. For now anyways….we’ll see what happens with HRR once the new CBA is signed in a couple years and when the league renegotiates their TV deals in a few years.

The cap ceiling for the 2022-23 season was $82.5M, an increase of $1M from the previous three seasons, which means Palat’s deal was making up 7.27% of the salary cap when the deal was signed.

The salary cap ceiling has since increased to $88M for this upcoming season, lowering the percentage that Palat is taking up to 6.82%, a difference of almost half a percentage point. In the grand scheme of things, that doesn’t sound like a lot. But when considering the minimum player salary is $775,000, and that takes up 0.88% of the $88M salary cap this season, that half percentage might be the difference between getting, say, Stefan Noesen at his number or not. Again, we don’t know what we don’t know, but a couple hundred thousand dollars here or there might be the difference between getting a player or not. That’s part of the benefit of having your core locked in at team-friendly deals. As the cap goes up, there’s more money to go around to everybody else on the 23-man roster.

If the cap ceiling continues to increase at this rate, that percentage continues to drop in future years until the contract expires or the Devils find a way to move on from the deal. If the cap ceiling is $92.M in 2025-26, that percentage drops to 6.52%, and if the cap ceiling is $97M the following year, Palat would be taking up 6.18% of the cap going into the final year of his deal.

Obviously, the salary cap going up doesn’t have a direct impact on any player’s play on the ice. But what it can do is take a deal that isn’t ideal and make it more tolerable going into the latter years of that deal. It can also take a deal that is generally viewed as one of the best deals in the sport (ie: Jack Hughes at $8M AAV through 2030) and make it even better as his percentage against the cap continues to drop in future years. That’s not to say that bad contracts can’t be signed…..we saw a few of them this offseason that might not be great (glances towards Seattle’s direction with Chandler Stephenson). But this isn’t Seth Jones being signed until 2030 playing 25 minutes a night either. The one saving grace for Chicago is that the team is so bad now, Seth Jones making a ton of money isn’t really hurting them.

Had the salary cap continued to remain flat, the Palat deal would look worse as he enters the final years of that commitment. But with the cap increasing just as that next wave of Devils players coming off of ELCs need new deals, Palat’s deal is simply neutral. Neither good nor bad.

Final Thoughts

I think there are two ways to look at the Palat contract now that we’re two years into it.

If you look at Palat, and any forward for that matter, under the microscope of “only goals and assists matter” and you better be scoring X goals and X assists per season to be worth X amount of dollars, then yes, you are probably disappointed with Ondrej Palat through two years in New Jersey. 19 goals and 35 assists through two seasons in New Jersey, plus another 3 goals and 4 assists in 12 playoff games the one time the Devils made the playoffs, doesn’t jump off the page screaming $6M a year player. Particularly when we are two years into a five year commitment. I won’t fight with you if that’s how you want to look at it, but I do think its probably a shortsighted way of looking at building a hockey team.

I think with Palat in particular, that was always the wrong way of looking at this type of player. This is more akin to the Yankees paying Derek Jeter as much as they were paying him even though there were better shortstops in MLB at the time. With Palat, you’re paying for the intangibles. You’re paying for leadership. You’re paying for him to do the little things at the right time and to make the winning plays that win hockey games. You’re paying for him to, ideally, bring a winning culture that he was a part of in Tampa Bay to New Jersey. As I said earlier, I think there’s a debate to be had whether or not that type of player specifically is worth $6M a year through 2027. But I don’t think Tom Fitzgerald is losing any sleep at night bringing in a character guy for a team that needed more adults in the room.

I don’t know if the Devils will win a Stanley Cup while Palat is on the roster, but I suspect he’s one of those guys where his work behind the scenes and his impact on others will be the legacy he winds up leaving in New Jersey, if he leaves a legacy at all. Palat might not actually hoist the Cup here, but his fingerprints could be on it if they do.

Like a lot of players on the Devils, Palat did not have a good year in 2023-24. Unlike a lot of players on the Devils who did not have a good year, Palat is still here. Part of that is because of his contract, his NMC, and most teams not looking to take on $6M for three more years for a guy who’s best attributes are intangible. But part of that is also for the intangible reasons that I’ve already pointed out as well.

Palat is at an age where players typically don’t improve, so any improvement from him will likely have to come from him staying healthy (something he has been unable to do his first two years in New Jersey) and where he plays in the lineup, as he’s more likely to have success (in terms of goals and assists) on Hischier or Hughes’s wing than he is in the bottom six.

So is the Palat contract that bad? Well, its not great. But its not the worst contract ever either.

It’s fine.