Red Wings & Tatar Settle

The Detroit Red Wings and Tomas Tatar did go through the arbitration hearing on Thursday, but before the ruling could drop, the two sides agreed on a new 4-year deal, reportedly worth $21.2 million.

Things were thought to be rather dicey between the team and player, leading up to the arbitration hearing, but getting a 4-year deal done, suggests that either those reports were severely overblown or they were able to mend their fence and get back onto better terms.

Last season, Tatar's season was good, but it certainly wasn't great.  He was a 25-goal scorer for the Red Wings, finishing with 46 points, playing in all 82 games.  That was good enough for 107th among all forwards in scoring.

Tatar's $5.3 million cap hit does put him among some other decent 25-goal scorers in the league, like Logan Couture ($6 million) and Brayden Schenn ($5.1 million), so it isn't an unreasonable deal for the Red Wings at the end of the day.

Forwards	Cap	Defense	Cap	Goalies	Cap
Henrik Zetterberg	6.083	Mike Green	6.000	Jimmy Howard	5.292
Tomas Tatar	5.300	Danny DeKeyser	5.000	Petr Mrazek	4.000
Frans Nielsen	5.250	Niklas Kronwall	4.750
Gustav Nyquist	4.750	Jonathan Ericsson	4.250
Justin Abdelkader	4.250	Trevor Daley	3.178
Johan Franzen	3.955	Xavier Ouellet	1.250
Darren Helm	3.850	Nick Jensen	0.813
Riley Sheahan	2.075
Luke Glendening	1.800
Dylan Larkin	0.925
Evgeny Svechnikov	0.863
Anthony Mantha	0.863
Eric Tangradi	0.650
Tyler Bertuzzi	0.645

With Johan Franzen on the shelf for what should be the rest of his contract, he will spend this season on the Long-Term Injured Reserve, which is the only way the Red Wings are going to fit Tatar's deal under the ceiling.  This 23-man roster, with Franzen in tow, is $3.81 million over the cap ceiling, so the Red Wings will have every intention of using Franzen's LTIR help for the better part of this season, one would have to believe.

It gets worse too... the team still has to re-sign Andreas Athanasiou, which won't come too cheaply.  There's a fine chance that the Red Wings may only be playing with 21 or 22 players on their active roster for the better part of the season, unless they are able to dump Franzen's deal on another NHL club.