The news reverberated out of no where when the Penguins signed Ville Koivunen for an eight-year contract and a healthy $4.0 million cap hit. No matter how you slice it, there’s been a big bet made on a player prior to proving he truly deserved it, which opens up obvious questions about the reasoning behind making such a move.
Let’s dive in more and gain a new perspective that could help understanding just what this contract really means.
This projection, if anything, shows that it doesn’t take a lot to get a $4.0 million player in the expanding NHL salary cap world. Koivunen would only need to moderately improve his point production to start getting into justifying the money. It can be a hard pill to swallow given that he’s looked slow and not quite quick enough to be effective in the NHL so far, but there’s some signs that he might be able to get there. Whether or not he will, of course, is another debate.
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The comparable players to Koivunen might be the most fascinating part to consider for just where he might end up as a finished product. There are a bunch of similar players with a wide variety of career tracks.
Locking down a potential Troy Terry, Jack Drury or Jesper Fast would be a big win for the Penguins, let alone if Koivunen had a Viktor Arvidsson future lined up. Up until age-22, Arvidsson was a great AHL scorer with six goals in 64 games – then he popped off for 31 in 2026-17 and has gone onto have a nice career as a mid-line support player.
The trade off, and where the risk comes in, is that this best case scenario is far from guaranteed. If Koivunen trends more to the “just a guy” or worse area of following in the footsteps of Benn Ferriero or Anders Bjork, suddenly the contract looks like a big problem for a long-lasting huge cap hit on a player that isn’t capable of making much of an impact at the NHL level. And that above grouping of player contains more misses than players deserving of a max term contract.
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Then again, maybe it shouldn’t look that way to gain a true understanding of the perspective of why an unestablished player signed a massive contract.
There is quietly an off-ramp built in, via a wrinkle in the NHL’s collective bargaining agreement. Players under the age of 26 can be bought out for one-third of the contract, unlike the standard 2/3 that an older player gets in a buyout. If the Pens were to buy out Koivunen in the summer of 2028, they’d sidestep almost all of the issues created with this contract. This area probably wasn’t lost under Kyle Dubas, but surely now would have been highlighted by the Pens’ new consultant Brandon Pridham – who was involved in writing the CBA.
Based on the backloaded structure for the salary components on the contract, it is prime for a buyout. Per PuckPedia, here is what it would look like if the Pens bought Koivunen out in 2028.
(Note: screen cutoff, the annual $729,167 penalty continues through the 2039-40 season)
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Dead cap money in hockey is usually seen as a plague to be avoided, but the rising cap mitigates the impact in a way where perceptions will need to be updated. The NHL salary cap should be in the $125 million range in 2028-29 and figures to grow beyond that in future years. Taking a $479k penalty would be negligible at best for the Penguins. The whole thing would become more of a footnote and trivia point hanging around the margins than anything else – should things come to that.
Due to the economies of scale it can be difficult to compare the NHL to the NFL in a business sense, but carrying plenty of dead cap hits is a standard operating procedure in the NFL. The Steelers, for instance, are projected at holding $12.2 million in dead space in 2026 (though, of course, the NFL salary cap being over $300 million makes that a drop in the bucket). Such a shift in mindset could wind it’s way into normality in hockey as their caps begin to grow and allow for more tolerance of inefficient penalty cap hits.
Of course, a team isn’t going to be keen to make a bold move in signing an eight-year deal thinking they will have to buy it out in two seasons, yet practically that has to be remembered when thinking about the very essence of this contract. In essence, this could be seen as the Pens giving Koivunen $8 million for two years with a team option for five more in 2028 when they assess whether Koivunen is worth keeping or better off cutting losses for the most marginal of penalties. Such money at $8mx2 is still an excessive amount for Koivunen’s worth and value in the short-term, but one the Penguins can easily afford with all their current cap space to hedge a bet against the possibility that Koivunen justifies showing that he can be a capable NHL player from 2028-33.
Dubas even said he preferred to think of the deal as a ‘bet’, a bit of a departure from the standard signing of a young player to a max-length extension. By that outlook what is a long contract isn’t an eight-year promise to a core player but a risk the team was willing to do to see if it works.
If that happens, Pittsburgh would find themselves in a winning position to have a useful, prime-aged player locked up for what will be an exceedingly reasonable amount should Koivunen trend the way of a Jesper Fast type by 2028. It would be a home run and huge win if somehow Koivunen does even better than that and has Troy Terry or Viktor Arvidsson production at the age of 25 in a couple years. In the event it doesn’t work out and Koivunen’s trajectory falls short, the team has an option to bail and chalk the whole thing up to taking a chance that didn’t pay off with very minimal cost moving forward.
