In three seasons, Seth Jarvis has established himself as one of the NHL’s brightest young talents. In 2023-24, the 22-year-old took a massive step forward with 33 goals and 67 points in the regular season. He added another five goals and nine points in the playoffs.
As dangerous as the Winnipeg native can be on the ice, he’s known for an endearing, happy-go-lucky personality that shines through in his downtime. But Saturday’s announcement of Jarvis’s new eight-year contract shows that, when necessary, he can be all business.
The Hurricanes disclosed that the deal is for $63.2 million in total, or $7.9 million on average per season. The sum is about perfectly in line with what AFP Analytics had predicted for a long-term Jarvis contract. They were paid $7.926 million a season for a seven-year tenure.
That’s a little below fellow 2020 first-rounder Tim Stutzle of the Ottawa Senators, who is also locked up long-term. He’s headed into Year 2 of an eight-year deal at a cap hit of $8.35 million. But Stutzle is the top performer from his draft class by a wide margin. He already has four seasons under his belt and put up 90 points in 2022-23, after he inked his extension.
Jarvis’s deal does compare favorably to Matt Boldy’s seven years at $7 million with the Minnesota Wild. Boldy is a year older, but has produced at a similar level. Jarvis is also a little higher than the extension signed by Juraj Slafkovsky with the Montreal Canadiens after just his second season, when he put up 50 points. His second contract will start in 2025-26, and carry a cap hit of $7.6 million.
Slafkovsky and Jarvis share the same agent, Gerry Johansson of The Sports Corporation. And while Slafkovsky’s deal, which was signed on July 1, follows a typical NHL contract structure, Jarvis’s includes an interesting twist — a significant amount of deferred money.
Jarvis’s contract includes a total of $29.24 million in signing bonuses. According to PuckPedia, those bonuses are allocated across five years of the deal:
- Year 1: $8.95 million (present value $7.233 million)
- Year 2: $4.95 million (present value $3.41 million)
- Year 3: $4 million
- Year 7: $5.77 million (present value $5.187 million)
- Year 8: $5.57 million
PuckPedia also reports that payment of the bonuses from Year 1, Year 2 and Year 7 won’t be made until July 1, 2032 — the day after the contract expires. That day, 30-year-old Jarvis will receive $19.47 million in real money.
But because a dollar today is worth more than a dollar tomorrow, those three bonuses are discounted to their present values by the NHL for salary-cap purposes. That drops the total cap charge by nearly $4 million, to $15.67 million.
The amounts deferred for Seth Jarvis #canes:
-Year 1 $4.95M Signing Bonus
-Year 2 $4.95M Signing Bonus
-Year 7 $5.77M Signing BonusThis total of $15.67M is deferred until July 1, 2032
— PuckPedia (@PuckPedia) August 31, 2024
So Jarvis will receive his full $63.2 million payout on an atypical schedule, which drops the present value of the contract to $59.36 million. As a result, the Hurricanes will absorb a cap hit of $7.42 million over each of the eight years instead of the full $7.9 million. That lower number leaves Carolina with just $79,913 in projected cap space, according to PuckPedia.
The deferred money does come at a real cost to Jarvis. He won’t be able to put his Year 1 bonus of $8.95 million to work when the banks open on Tuesday, earning interest or as part of an investment vehicle. Instead, he’ll have to wait until 2032 to access those funds and start making money on his money.
New Hurricanes general manager Eric Tulsky is a brilliant mathematical mind, holding a Ph.D in chemistry. The fact that he’s on one side of this negotiation suggests that he floated the strategy of salary deferral as a way of meeting his player’s asking price while staying within Carolina’s hard-cap parameters.
According to Frank Seravalli of Daily Faceoff, both the NHL’s Central Registry and the NHL Players’ Association were briefed in advance on the structure of Jarvis’s contract, and gave their stamp of approval.
Seravalli also points out that the Hurricanes used a similar tactic, to a much smaller degree, when they signed their defenseman Jaccob Slavin to his eight-year contract extension on July 1. Slavin, who is repped by Kurt Overhardt at KO Sports, Inc., has had his signing bonus from Year 7 of his deal deferred until the day after his contract expires: July 1, 2033, per PuckPedia.
The total value of the contract is $51.69 million, which would be a cap hit of $6.46 million. But the Year 7 signing bonus is discounted to its present value of $4.55 million, bringing the value of the contract for salary-cap purposes down to $51.17 million, or a cap hit of $6.39 million per year.
Do the math, and we can infer that the real cash value of Slavin’s deferred bonus in 2033 will be $4.55 million + $520,000 = $5.07 million.
Because the impact of the deferral is relatively small — and because Slavin’s extension was registered on July 1, amid a flurry of more than $1 billion in free-agent signings — the contract quirk flew under the radar at the time.
The structure of this deal saves Carolina just $65,000 a year in cap space — and while every dollar certainly counts, it’s not enough to be particularly significant. “It’s almost as if Slavin’s deal was Carolina’s trial balloon,” Seravalli muses.
With less than three weeks remaining before NHL training camps open for the 2024-25 season, a number of high-profile restricted free agents remain unsigned, including goaltender Jeremy Swayman of the Boston Bruins, Moritz Seider and Lucas Raymond of the Detroit Red Wings, Dawson Mercer of the New Jersey Devils and Thomas Harley of the Dallas Stars.
It will be interesting to see if any other GMs incorporate a deferred-salary term as a tool to end a negotiating stalemate.
