3 more years of Luke Glendening

While there are a fair number of off-season questions ahead for Detroit, they did take one of them off the table by extending Luke Glendening with a three-year contract, paying just more than the league minimum.

In one way, this is a low-risk deal. Glendening will just have to out-perform an AHL replacement-level player to live up to this deal. In every other way, this is probably not a good contract.

As I said, this is a very low-bar for Glendening to clear. What's disturbing is that he has not done so this year. The 24-year-old center should be in the middle of his prime scoring years, but he has yet to score an NHL goal. In fact, Glendening is one of only five forwards in the entire NHL to play in at least 50 games and fail to score this season. That puts him on a list with Krys Barch and Colton Orr.

You would think just out of sheer luck he would have potted one by now. Of course, it's easier to get a lucky bounce if you occasionally are able to get the puck out of your own end. That's another thing Glendening has struggled to do. Detroit has been a middling possession team this year, with a 5-on-5 close Corsi of 51%. Glendening's rating is 48.7%, better than only Stephen Weiss and basically tied with Todd Bertuzzi. The story only gets worse when you consider two players in a similar role, Drew Miller (50.1%) and Joakim Andersson (53.1%), are easily out-performing him in that metric. In fact, Miller would probably have even better numbers if he was not so often paired with Glendening.

It's true, Glendening's role is a defensive specialist and he plays the second most time on the penalty kill among forwards. But Detroit is not exactly hanging its hat on defense this year (ranked 19th in goals against and 11th in penalty kill).

The Detroit broadcast crew likes to play up Glendening's role as an agitator. However, when you look at his penalties drawn versus penalties taken, he's only plus 4 on the season. Good for only 9th on the team.

In the salary cap era, when every dollar and roster spot counts, strong depth is what makes elite teams elite. Too often in the past couple of seasons Detroit has tried to achieve this by dolling out overly long contracts to depth players (when they were completely unnecessary). Bertuzzi, Samuelsson, Tootoo. Four years for Kindl, three years for Lashoff. These players have had the type of production that can easily and cheaply be replaced every year in free agency. On the flip side, locking up these mediocre players leads to situations where Gustav Nyquist is forced to sit in the minors for the first two months of the season.

So Glendening may play a small role on the team and his deal is going to count almost nothing against the cap, the fact is, he's thus far contributed less than what most teams would expect from any AHL call up. There's basically no reason to lock him up beyond one year, and some pretty obvious reasons not to.