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Making Sense of the Flyers Giving 29-Year-Old Christian Dvorak a Five-Year Contract
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It’s 5 x $5.15 million for Christian Dvorak:
The initial reaction is a bit of head scratching on the contract length. Why are you giving a 29-year-old a five-year deal? Dvorak turns 30 in February and this contract will take him to age 34. The general thought was that he’d get three years, up to age 32.
It feels like excess for a two-way center who has never logged 40 points in a season, but he’s playing really well right now and pacing out to smash his career best. With 9 goals and 16 assists through January 5th, a 50-point season is totally doable. He plays Rick Tocchet’s 200-foot game and there’s an obvious chemistry with Trevor Zegras that has seemed to bring out the best in both players. And when you consider how difficult it’s been for the Flyers to find serviceable centers over the last several years, it shouldn’t be a surprise that they jumped at the chance to extend a guy like Dvorak after bringing him in on a one-year deal to plug a hole. It’s a very on-brand Flyers thing to fall in love with a guy like this.
Kevin Kurz of The Athletic reports that this new contract has a full no-trade clause for the first two years, then it goes limited trade in years three and four and full open trade in year five. They can get off the contract if they need to about halfway through it. $5.15 million is really the new $3 million when you consider the incremental increases to the NHL’s salary cap. This isn’t breaking the bank, but you can understand why some fans are less enthused, because you’re supposed to be exiting the rebuild and pursuing exciting, big names in free agency, and here comes Danny Briere with five years for a journeyman center. Now you’ve got almost $13 million tied to Sean Couturier and Christian Dvorak, who are a combined 62 years old at the moment.
In a couple of seasons, maybe Dvorak turns into the next Scott Laughton, a bottom-six center on a contender with a movable contract. That’s probably the best-case scenario in terms of how that contract looks beyond its halfway point. Unless he goes on a total heater and morphs into the next Joe Thornton. Regardless, they needed to get this deal done now, because Dvorak was an unrestricted free agent, which meant extend or trade before the deadline. They’ll get a Zegras extension done sooner or later, we hope.
Kevin has been writing about Philadelphia sports since 2009. He spent seven years in the CBS 3 sports department and started with the Union during the team's 2010 inaugural season. He went to the academic powerhouses of Boyertown High School and West Virginia University. email - k.kinkead@sportradar.com