Now that the Stanley Cup has been handed out, it's time for trade rumors, draft buzz, and the frenzy of free agency.
That frenzy is particularly interesting to me. While we don't know for sure what names are on the trade market or which team will draft who, we do have a stronger idea of the free agents set to hit the market on July 1st, and we can actually take a stab at quantifying what those free agents might be worth.
That's where the fair contract table comes in. I've put together a table of 50 of the most attractive free agent names and compared each player's production with others around the league. I then averaged out the contracts of players that compare favorably and assigned each potential unrestricted free agent a cap hit and term length. The results aren't a promise of anything. Looking at the table there are certainly some contracts that I would consider either too rich or a great bargain (particularly when considering advanced metrics, which based on history I would guess don't come into play very much in contract negotiation - yet). However, I just wanted to provide a framework for people to get some sense of the contracts that a lot of the upcoming free agents could be looking at. I also wanted to provide a framework to compare what historically would be a fair contract for a given amount of production versus what a player will actually end up getting (Ryan Callahan asking for $6 or 7 million comes to mind).
