Is Simon Nemec’s new Flames contract a good deal?

The Calgary Flames got a significant piece of off-season business completed on Monday, announcing a five year deal for newly acquired defenceman Simon Nemec that will keep him wearing a snazzy red jersey through the 2030-31 season.

Nemec’s deal comes during a pretty interesting off-season for defencemen exiting their entry-level years. The Los Angeles Kings signed Brandt Clarke to a five year deal back on June 26 and the Anaheim Ducks, perhaps pressured by an offer sheet presented to their player, signed Pavel Mintyukov to a five year deal of his won on July 5.

So, is Nemec’s new contract a good deal for player and team?

Let’s dive into the recent comparable contracts to find out. We’ll be looking at defencemen signed out of their entry-level contracts over the past few years, and looking at their per-game points and goal production both in their entire ELC (“ELC”) and the last year of their ELC (“Last”). For the sake of simplicity, we’re ignoring underlying numbers and deployments and focusing only on counting stats.

Looking at some recent bridge contracts

Bridge deals essentially involve kicking the proverbial can down the road. Do we want to commit to you with big bucks long-term? We’re not sure! So we’ll see if we can delay the decision for a bit. As a result, these deals tend to have lower cap hits, even for players that were productive during their entry-level years.

Nemec’s closest bridge comparable in terms of points was probably Ryker Evans and in terms of goals was probably Noah Dobson. If you split the difference, a bridge cap hit would have probably been somewhere around 4% of the salary cap (or around $4 million for two seasons).

A long-term deal

These deals are where teams commit to players, in every case buying a year or two of unrestricted free agency. As a result of giving up their ability to test the market, these deals are much pricier.

If you want to judge Nemec’s deal by points-per-game, his cap hit is a bit higher than his production would merit. However, on a goals-per-game basis, he’s the highest performer here – granted, yeah, he had a smaller games-played sample size than his comparison group. When you factor in Nemec’s production to-date, and the fact that the Flames gave up quite a few assets to acquire him and thus, Nemec’s camp had a bit of leverage in negotiations, his deal doesn’t seem to be much of an outlier compared to the others.

Yeah, maybe his cap hit is a little bit higher than his points and goals-per-game would merit on their own, but we’re not talking about a large deviation from the marketplace.

What do you think about Simon Nemec’s contract with the Flames?