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Contract negotiations are a delicate thing. Some NHL players prefer tuning them out all together during the season. Others might want the process wrapped up quickly — but fairly — and listen in on every detail year round.

The key is not to let those conversations be a distraction to what is actually being achieved on the ice.

Just ask Alexis Lafreniere.

He’s the latest player to sign a long-term extension, inking a seven-year, $52.15 million pact with the New York Rangers last week on the heels of a breakout 2023-24 campaign where the 23-year-old tallied 28 goals and 57 points in 82 games. If Lafreniere continues that sort of growth his big deal will be a sweet steal for the Rangers.

Now that Lafreniere is locked in long term, who might be next to secure the proverbial bag?

There’s already speculation around what the likes of Connor McDavid, Cale Makar and Kirill Kaprizov could receive on a fresh extension, which they’re all eligible to sign beginning next July.

After conversations with league insiders, here is a sample of players — from the obvious to perhaps more obscure — that are poised to (possibly) get paid sooner rather than later. And with the NHL salary cap expected to keep climbing upwards from its current $88 million, there’s (potentially) even more money to spare when those contracts are doled out.

The superstars

It was a gasp heard ’round the hockey world when ESPN’s Kevin Weekes reported earlier this month that Rangers goaltender Igor Shesterkin had turned down an eight-year, $88 million extension — which would have made Shesterkin the highest-paid goalie in NHL history.

Make no mistake: Shesterkin will be paid handsomely at some point — in New York or somewhere else if the pending unrestricted free agent so chooses. And that deal will recalibrate the market for goaltenders going forward.

“My guess is Shesterkin will get upwards of $11.5 [million] per,” one agent said. “He’s not going to settle for a lower number just because. I think the [Jeremy] Swayman situation proved that’s no longer [a norm].”

Fair enough. Plus, Shesterkin has come a long way over the course of his current four-year, $22.67 million deal. He won a Vezina Trophy as the league’s top goaltender following the 2021-22 season, and finished third that year in Hart Trophy voting for league MVP. He’s perennially one of the NHL’s top netminders and this season is no different; Shesterkin is 4-1-1, with a .926 save percentage and 2.16 goals-against average, both of which ratios are top five in the NHL.

Shesterkin’s position as New York’s backbone makes his next contract the massive move worth watching for next — and who knows? There could be more drama on the way there before pens hit paper.

Speaking of dramatics, there’s been no shortage of those surrounding Mitch Marner. The Toronto Maple Leafs winger has declined to comment publicly on extension talks, but they are happening behind closed doors. Marner’s current mark of $10.9 million per year seems likely to rise, and he has two teammates as points of comparison in talks: Auston Matthews‘ $13.5 million per year salary and William Nylander‘s $11.5 million. Marner falls somewhere in the middle.

His camp has taken a “wait and see” approach with the Leafs thus far, testing the waters from training camp into the new season and watching how that played out. Marner’s had a solid start to the campaign with one goal and 10 points in nine games, giving him the team lead in scoring. With that in mind, it would behoove the Leafs to get Marner’s deal done now before any asking price starts to rise.

On the other hand, it’s the postseason where Toronto has most wanted to see Marner at his best — and where the winger has repeatedly faltered at being a certifiable difference-maker.

“It wouldn’t surprise me at all if Marner gets to the summer without an extension,” another agent said. “It also wouldn’t shock me if Marner was the next guy signed [to a big contract]. He’s a dominant player. But how does [GM Brad Treliving] see that team’s core now and going forward? It all factors in.”

One marquee player who might not be satisfied quickly (or easily) by his current club? Mikko Rantanen. The Colorado Avalanche‘s top-line winger appears to have stalled out in conversations with the Avs about extending beyond his current deal worth $9.25 million per season. Rantanen has teammate Nathan MacKinnon‘s eight-year, $100.8 million contract as a comparison tool, and that’s not necessarily the range Colorado sees Rantanen landing in — even if Rantanen does.

Expect Rantanen to use a hot 2024-25 campaign — in which he’s now tied for third in league scoring with four goals and 13 points — to showcase why he’s worth a MacKinnon-like payday when the time comes to close a deal, in Colorado or somewhere else.


The core set

It’s not like typically tight-lipped New York Islanders GM Lou Lamoriello is going to tip his hand about Brock Nelson‘s future with the team. But, Nelson is a pending UFA and despite some rampant speculation the Islanders could move him at the trade deadline, there’s a strong case to be made for paying the man to stay long-term.

Nelson’s career has been on the rise for most of the past three seasons, over which he’s led New York with 111 goals and 209 points in 244 games (that’s with three consecutive 30-plus goal outings). Frankly, the 33-year-old has been showing up for a roster that’s consistently short on scoring, and the fact he’s getting better year over year makes extending him past this six-year, $36 million contract smart business for Lamoriello. Foundational pieces like Nelson are hard to come by.

It’s a similar situation with Vancouver forward Brock Boeser. Despite an up-and-down run with the Canucks to date that included last season’s disappointing finish to the postseason due to a blood-clotting issue, there’s no denying Boeser’s position as a steady force in Vancouver’s offense. The 27-year-old had the best regular season of his career in 2023-24, pacing the Canucks with 40 goals and 73 points in 81 games — then added seven goals and 12 points in 12 postseason tilts before being sidelined. Those numbers — coupled with a point-per-game start to this season — should net Boeser a hefty increase on his current three-year, $19.95 million deal.

It may take a while for the Canucks to sort through their cap situation and find a middle ground with Boeser. And given how well he’s playing, Boeser might not mind waiting, either.

Another core player that seems like a no-brainer for a long-term deal is Florida Panthers center Sam Bennett. Talks are ongoing between the Panthers and their pending UFA, and that’s a great thing for both parties. Florida already sealed the (long-term) deal with Carter Verhaeghe this month, and taking care of Bennett is GM Bill Zito’s next priority.

Bennett has eclipsed the 40-point mark in his last three seasons with Florida and gathered 20-plus goals in two of those outings, making him one of the Panthers’ most reliable pieces up front. He’s shown to be one of the league’s prominent power forwards — an increasingly rare breed — and Bennett also packed a punch for the Panthers in the playoffs, averaging nearly a point per game in both of their runs to the Stanley Cup Final, in 2023 and 2024.

Bennett is wrapping up a contract worth $4.425 million this season, and while he should expect a raise of some sort, the opportunity to keep winning in Florida might be all the juice Bennett needs to get a more team-friendly deal closed and keep the good times rolling.


The rising stars

It’s simpler, in some cases, to peg where established players (like those above) might land in terms of their next significant contracts. For the ones still putting down roots in the league? Trickier!

Take the Boston BruinsMorgan Geekie. He had a standout season in 2023-24, with career-high totals in goals (17) and points (39) through 76 games. Geekie entered training camp this fall with elevated expectations and top-six potential. Boston’s uncharacteristically slow start to the campaign has seemed to put the entire team — including Geekie — in a haze, and the 26-year-old has just one assist in his first eight games.

What does it all mean in the grand scheme for Boston’s pending RFA? Plenty. The Bruins have seen Patrice Bergeron and David Krejci retire in recent years, and it’s guys like Geekie who can replace them into the future. That’s not to say Geekie will be overpaid immediately, but it’s in Boston’s best interest to give Geekie a solid deal that solidifies his place as a premier part of their future. Doing so before summer could be a boost for Geekie’s confidence.

The Dallas Stars have a comparably important player in Wyatt Johnston, who’s also set to be a restricted free agent — and who they would be wise to take care of in short order. Johnston has face-of-the-franchise potential after the last two seasons, during which time he produced 56 goals and 106 points. Johnston is also just 21 years old; given he’s already become a cornerstone of the Stars’ offense, that’s going to cost them on a new deal.

Offering Johnston a long-term deal at around the same $8-$8.5 million a year salary that Dallas has doled out to teammates Roope Hintz and Miro Heiskanen should be enough to keep everyone happy. Johnston has been with Dallas on consecutive trips to the Western Conference finals, and the opportunity to stay in a winning fold is hard to turn down.

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Gundy calls out Ducks’ budget; Lanning fires back

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Gundy calls out Ducks' budget; Lanning fires back

Oklahoma State coach Mike Gundy and Oregon coach Dan Lanning are unexpectedly giving the Week 2 matchup between their teams some extra juice.

While speaking on his radio show Monday, Gundy said Oklahoma State spent “around $7 million” on its team over the past three years before referring to how much the Ducks have spent on their roster in recent years.

“I think Oregon spent close to $40 [million] last year alone,” Gundy said. “So, that was just one year. Now, I might be off a few million.”

Gundy made several other comments about Oregon’s resources — he said “it’ll cost a lot of money to keep” Ducks quarterback Dante Moore and that he believes Oregon’s budget should determine the programs they schedule outside of the Big Ten.

“Oregon is paying a lot, a lot of money for their team,” Gundy said. “From a nonconference standpoint, there’s coaches saying they should [play teams with similar budgets].”

On Monday night during his weekly news conference, Lanning responded.

“If you want to be a top-10 team in college football, you better be invested in winning. We spend to win,” Lanning said when asked about Gundy’s comments. “Some people save to have an excuse for why they don’t. … I can’t speak on their situation; I have no idea what they got in their pockets over there.”

Lanning added that he has “a lot of respect” for Gundy and praised how Gundy has consistently led his team to winning seasons over his 20-year tenure in Stillwater. Both teams are 1-0 this season; the Ducks are ranked No. 7 and are expected to be vying for a spot in the College Football Playoff.

“Over the last three to five years, they’ve elevated themselves. They have a lot of resources,” Gundy said. “They’ve got them stacked out there pretty good right now.”

Last year, Georgia coach Kirby Smart referenced Oregon’s resources, saying at SEC media days that he wishes he could get “some of that NIL money” that Oregon alum and Nike founder Phil Knight “has been sharing with Dan Lanning.”

“I think it’s impressive that guys like Kirby have been signing the No. 1 class in the nation without any NIL money this entire time,” Lanning said jokingly in response to Smart during Big Ten media days last year. “Obviously, Coach Smart took a little shot at us. But if you want to be a top-10 team in college football, you better have great support. We have that.”

While Smart’s and Lanning’s barbs had the tone of two coaches who have worked together (Lanning was Georgia’s defensive coordinator from 2019 to 2021), the back-and-forth with Gundy on Monday was unexpected.

“I’m sure UT-Martin maybe didn’t have as much as them last week, and they played,” Lanning said of Oklahoma State. “So, we’ll let it play out.”

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Belichick: Heels ‘better than what we were tonight’

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Belichick: Heels 'better than what we were tonight'

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — If Bill Belichick were still in New England, still helming a team he’d coached for a quarter-century, where he’d won six Super Bowls, he could have shrugged off Monday’s debacle against TCU as just a hiccup on a long road to somewhere better, answering his critics with his now ubiquitous retort: On to the next game.

In Chapel Hill on Monday, with a sell-out crowd eager to get its first glimpse of a new era of North Carolina football under the tutelage of one of the game’s all-time greats, what happened couldn’t be shrugged off so easily.

Belichick’s Tar Heels were embarrassed, with TCU rolling to a 48-14 win in which UNC didn’t simply look like the lesser team, but one that often appeared utterly unprepared for the moment.

“We’re better than what we were tonight but we have to go out there and show that and prove it,” Belichick said. “Nobody’s going to do it for us. We’re going to have to do it ourselves, and that’s what we’re going to do.”

Through the first drive of Belichick’s tenure as a college coach, everything had gone right.

Crowds filled the bars and restaurants along Franklin Street in Chapel Hill hours before kickoff. A pregame concert, headlined by country star and UNC alum Chase Rice, set the stage for a star-studded event. Michael Jordan and Lawrence Taylor and Mia Hamm were all in attendance as the Belichick era at North Carolina finally kicked off.

And then the Tar Heels delivered a flawlessly executed 83-yard touchdown drive, and the packed house at Kenan Stadium exploded.

This was the dream when UNC shocked the college football world by landing Belichick, and suddenly Belichick’s promise of bringing a national championship to a program that hasn’t even won an ACC title in more than half a century felt entirely plausible.

Then TCU delivered one cold dose of reality after another, and by midway through the third quarter, after Devean Deal‘s scoop-and-score on a Gio Lopez fumble put the Horned Frogs up by 34, the once-frenetic stands emptied out and the hope for something magical in Chapel Hill seemed a distant memory.

“They out-played us, out-coached us, and they were just better than we were tonight,” Belichick said. “It’s all there was to it. They did a lot more things right than we did.”

Belichick turned over the bulk of North Carolina’s roster in one offseason, bringing in 70 new players — nearly half of whom arrived after spring practice. The transformation of the roster along with Belichick’s famously guarded approach to media meant few outside of North Carolina’s locker room had a clear vision of just what this squad would look like.

By the time the bludgeoning was over, the mantra from the Tar Heels’ perspective was that this performance hardly showcased what they’d seen on the practice field for the past six weeks.

“I thought we were prepared for the game,” backup quarterback Max Johnson said. “We prepared for a week and a half for TCU specifically, but we’ve been working on our fundamentals for a year now. We need to do a better job executing.”

After the opening touchdown drive, North Carolina went three-and-out on five of its next six drives. Lopez went more than two hours of real time between completions. UNC failed to convert its first six third-down tries, and Lopez threw a pick-six late in the first half that seemed to be the last gasp for the Tar Heels. The defense was equally catastrophic. TCU racked up 542 yards of total offense and ran for 258 yards, including a 75-yard scamper by Kevorian Barnes, and the Heels missed one tackle after another after another.

“Too many three-and-outs, too many long plays on defense, two turnovers for touchdowns. You can’t overcome that,” Belichick said. “We just can’t perform well doing some of the things we did. We’ve got to be better than that. We had too many self-inflicted wounds we have to eliminate before we can even worry about addressing our opponent.”

Johnson came on in relief of Lopez, who left after his sack-fumble with a lower back injury, and he delivered a touchdown drive that at least offered some spark of life for the Heels’ offense. Belichick said it was unclear whether Lopez would be able to play Saturday at Charlotte, but he left open the possibility that the QB competition could be re-opened.

“We’ll see how Gio is,” Belichick said. “Max came in after being off for a long time and hung in there and made some plays in a tough situation. We’ll take a look at it and see where things are at and go from there. It’s too early to tell now.”

Before the game, Belichick spent nearly a half-hour on the field watching both teams go through warm-ups. He chatted with dignitaries and appeared to bask in the moment, but the magic quickly evaporated.

The 48 points scored by TCU in Belichick’s first career game as a college coach are more than his teams allowed in any of his 333 NFL games, and for as much as he’d worked to sell North Carolina as “the 33rd NFL team,” Monday’s disaster felt like a reminder that, regardless of his success in the pros, this was new territory.

His response to the loss, however, was largely in line with what fans have come to expect of the understated coach — simple, succinct and emphatic.

“We’ve got a lot of work to do,” he said. “We’ll get at it.”

For a fan base that had waited nine months for this moment, however, it could be harder to turn the page. Belichick never promised a quick fix, but there were reasonable assurances that this team would play with physicality and fundamentals, that UNC wouldn’t be out-coached or out-schemed.

By halftime Monday, the veil had been lifted. Belichick has six Super Bowl rings, but this was a bigger job than perhaps any he’d assumed before.

The excitement that reached its apex after the opening touchdown drive perfectly showcased what this experiment could look like. The question now is whether UNC’s reality will ever match the dream or if Belichick’s first drive as a college coach will be remembered as the pinnacle of his tenure here.

“Don’t lose hope,” Johnson said. “We’re going to continue to put our best foot forward, continue to work and trust in each other.”

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FSU freshman shot, in critical but stable condition

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FSU freshman shot, in critical but stable condition

Florida State freshman linebacker Ethan Pritchard was shot Sunday night and is hospitalized in critical but stable condition in intensive care at a Tallahassee-area hospital, the school said Monday.

According to the Gadsden County Sheriff’s Office, Pritchard was inside a vehicle outside an apartment building when the shooting happened Sunday night in Havana, Florida, which is about 16 miles from Tallahassee, near the Georgia state line. An investigation into the shooting is ongoing.

In its statement, Florida State said Pritchard was visiting family at the time he was shot.

“The Pritchard family is thankful for the support from so many people, as well as the care from first responders and medical professionals, and asks that their privacy be respected at this time,” the FSU statement said.

Pritchard, who is from Sanford, Florida, enrolled at Florida State in January but did not play in the Seminoles’ season-opening victory against Alabama.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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