The Utah Mammoth have signed Nick Schmaltz to an eight-year contract extension worth $8 million annually.
Schmaltz’s importance to the team has always been high, but his play this season has been exceptional. He’s second on the team in goals and points, and although he has spent most of his NHL career as a winger, he made a seamless transition to the much more valuable center position this year — and has excelled at it.
His chemistry with Clayton Keller can’t be understated, either. This is the pair’s eighth season playing together, and it shows in the way that each of them always knows where the other is.
He’s the Henrik to Keller’s Daniel, for those familiar with the Hall of Fame’s Sedin twins.
Schmaltz is yet another big-name unrestricted free agent off the list for this summer. He doesn’t get talked about as much as most of the others, but led the league in points among pending UFAs before signing the deal.
As the biggest fish in the pond, Schmaltz would have been paid handsomely, had he gone to free agency. But the league gives an advantage to teams signing their own free agents: They’re the only teams that can sign players to eight-year deals. Had he gone elsewhere, he would have needed $9.14 million annually to hit the same total-dollar number.
Retaining Schmaltz allows the Mammoth to stay competitive without giving up extra assets. They could, for example, have brought in Robert Thomas at the deadline, but that would have cost them an arm and a leg (reports indicated that St. Louis wanted Utah’s three best prospects). Taking care of business in-house lets them keep their future.
Schmaltz joins Logan Cooley, Dylan Guenther and JJ Peterka as big-name stars who have chosen to sign long-term in Utah — but he’s the first to do so as a pending UFA. Ownership has put significant effort into making this a place where players will want to be, and this is a sign that it’s working.