With reports the San Jose Sharks are open for business, I've talked extensively about multiple players and how their new homes will be found before the deadline. We know that Sharks General Manager Mike Grier is working the phones to stockpile draft picks and prospects for the players on and around his roster. This has been the case since the traumatic 0-10-1 start to the season that drove fans to different coping methods.
Reports have been coming out recently regarding the likelihood of Marc-Edouard Vlasic and his contract being moved. At $7 million a season for this season, next season, and the year after that, it will be a tough sale to get a team wanting to take on that kind of money. If the Sharks are going to move on from one of the best defensemen the franchise has ever had the privilege of icing, they are going to need to eat part of that salary.
If the Sharks ate half of that deal down to make it a $3.5 million cap hit, it's still pretty undesirable. This is where the problem lies for moving Vlasic. He's still an above-average defenseman, specifically defensively. But he doesn't have so much of the competitive fire that Sharks fans around the globe came to love him for so long ago.
One of the questions I've gotten a lot is how would the Sharks even make this happen. Truth be told, it would not be easy. First of all, the Sharks only have one retention slot due to the Brent Burns and Erik Karlsson deals. It means eating money on another contract with multiple years remaining, like Vlasic, may be less favorable than keeping hold of the defenseman and using that retention slot on someone like Kevin Lebanc at the trade deadline who will be an unrestricted free agent at the end of the year.
With four years of retention left on the Karlsson deal and two left on the Burns deal, the Sharks will not be in a hurry to lock themselves into the three specific contracts. Being a seller means that finding a way to move some of these contracts is the absolute priority. You do not want to lose these assets for nothing. This is why the Vlasic situation is so interesting. Does it make more sense to wait and let his value diminish further as he gets older, or try to move it now biting the retention if you have to? What would you do?