Travis Sanheim Signs 8-Year, $50 Million Extension With Flyers
There are two core tenants to building a successful sports team — acquiring good talent and retaining it. The latter is especially pertinent in a salary-capped league like the NHL. In recent years, the Philadelphia Flyers have struggled with the former. Five years after accumulating arguably the league’s best pipeline, the Flyers have little to show for it. It’s a huge reason their expectations for the 2022-23 season, which begins in less than an hour, are so low.
Those failures in drafting and development make keeping the solid players the Flyers have churned out even more vital. Travis Sanheim, the No. 14 pick in the 2014 NHL Draft, is certainly one of those players. Despite some ups and downs throughout his first few NHL seasons, Sanheim is undoubtedly a top-four defenseman. And that was true before a very strong 2021-22 season that saw him produce stellar underlying numbers and score 27 5-on-5 points, tied for 19th in the NHL.
In a 2021-22 campaign full of disappointment and setbacks, Sanheim took a step forward. But one question still loomed: his long-term future with the organization. After all, the two-year, $4.675 million bridge deal Sanheim signed last summer was set to expire this year. Sanheim was slated to hit unrestricted free agency in just a few months. And given Philadelphia’s clogged-up cap situation — the Flyers already had about $63 million of their 2023-24 cap space accounted for. And with two of the organization’s top prospects in Cam York and Egor Zamula both playing left defense, it wasn’t hard to see a situation in which the Flyers sold high on Sanheim at the deadline and replaced him from within.
But that scenario isn’t happening. Not after the Flyers and Sanheim agreed to a maximum-term contract just before the season’s beginning.
Perhaps the best part of the Sanheim contract is that he’s only 26 years old, although the deal doesn’t start until next season. That means he probably won’t regress much, if at all, until maybe the final year or two of the deal. Sanheim has largely been a second-pair defender throughout his career. In fact, it’s possible his success with Rasmus Ristolainen in that role last season played a huge role in the team’s decision to pay up for his services. But if Sanheim is closer to the player statistical models believe he is, $6.25 million could be a great value.
The Sanheim extension gives the Flyers some flexibility down the line in some areas but forces them a bit in others. If Sanheim excels, and York and Zamula develop well, perhaps the Flyers move on from Ivan Provorov at some point in the next three seasons. Provorov is signed until the 2024-25 season at a $6.75 million cap hit. Or maybe the Flyers have to trade one of the kids or move them to their off-side.
The biggest question is whether or not the contract is worth signing with where the Flyers currently are. The team is probably looking at a few more years outside of the playoffs at least. Even if they do sneak in at some point, it’s hard to see them as anything close to Cup contenders before 2025 — and likely longer. Maybe from that perspective, the Sanheim extension turns into a dud. But Sanheim will only play a small part in the team’s success over the next nine seasons. But if he maintains, or even better, builds off his stellar 2021-22 campaign, he could play a larger part in it than some people might think — even if the best version of Travis Sanheim still leaves a lot of ground between what the Flyers and the league’s upper echelon.
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