What might Mikey Anderson’s new contract look like?

As we can see, Mikey Anderson has struggling offensive numbers that act as an anchor to his overall market value. Goal scoring, assists, and points all value at a “bottom” tier, while his offensive play at even strength has a “middle” value tier.

Anderson’s defensive value ranks in the “top” tier, which is the second highest tier. Having an estimated value of 5.5, his defensive play is not only noticeable with the eye test, but it also shows up on paper.

His GSVA does get held back by those offensive issues, yet his market value of $3.2 million seems to be very reasonable. The problem is that the LA Kings simply can’t afford it. If they were to give Anderson $3.2 million, it only leaves about $800,000 for Durzi. Plus, without any cap space, it’ll make roster moves virtually unworkable without abusing the LTIR rule.

While the Kings are up against the cap, Anderson being an RFA does limit some of the control he has in the negotiations. One thing that Anderson and his agent, Jay Grossman of Puck Agency LLC, can point to is the fact that among all defensemen who played on the LA Kings this past season, Anderson played the most against elite competition.

So now that we understand what Anderson’s market value is and what his pluses are, we can finally dig into the fun part, which is the contract projection. Although it took me an extremely long time to find these, we’ve managed to get Anderson’s closest comparables. These comparables are all in the 21-23 age range. Using Anderson’s latest season as the marking point, I’ve gone ahead and found five players whose individual seasons most closely matched Anderson’s 2021-22 campaign. Then, I added in their post-entry level contracts with their respective terms. I also added the season and ages of the players, as well as the comparable percentage, and added color to make it… fun!

Our five closest players are Kris Russell in 2009-10 (94.76%), Ryan Murray in 2017-18 (89.44%), Connor Carrick in 2017-18 (76.38%), Brandon Carlo in 2017-18 (68.72%), and Jonas Siegenthaler in 2018-19 (62.11%). All of these defenders are notoriously defensive specialists. One of them is even a Stanley Cup Champion.

What we’ve done in the past is find the average cost of all five player’s post-ELC contracts, but that has led us to inaccurate values. As the salary cap changes (almost) every year, the values of previous years decrease. So to find the average value between these five players, we’ll take the average percentages of the cap among all five players and put it into the current cap of $82.5 million.

Our weighted average comes out to 2.35% of the cap, or rather $1,938,750. That’s honestly a realistic and reasonable number if we’re talking about a short-term bridge deal. If Anderson were to sign for that much, it would leave the Kings with $2,066,250 to sign Sean Durzi and potentially leave the LA Kings with some wiggle room. 

The average term between the five players is precisely two years, which seems reasonable enough for Anderson. That deal would leave him as an RFA once it’s over, but he will be eligible for arbitration. Although $1.94 million for two years of Anderson sounds spectacular, he’ll likely want more than $2 million if the deal is longer than a year. 

So it is important to realize that if the deal is two years, Anderson may very well want over $2 million. If the contract is a one-year deal, Anderson may come as cheap as $1.8 million. Going at two years at $2m+ seems like the smarter idea. A one-year contract wouldn’t be bad either, as it’ll leave LA with more money to spend on Durzi. But based on Anderson’s comparables and market value, a contract that values at around the $2 million mark sounds very fair at this point.

Mikey Anderson has proven that he’s arguably one of the most valuable and promising pieces to the LA Kings blueline, and he will be a huge part of the team’s future. As contract negotiations continue, we await to see what the 23-year-old shutdown defender gets on his next deal.