Now at 50 contracts, Jesse Winchester’s injury hurts the Avalanche all over again

When the Colorado Avalanche signed Jesse Winchester to a two year $900k contract in the summer of 2014 it looked like a very savvy deal for a team that had struggled with forward depth the whole prior season. Just weeks after being bounced out of the first round of the playoffs with Brad Malone, Marc Andre Cliche, and Patrick Bordeleau all playing significant NHL roles for the Avs, they saw a need for a grinding, defensive, 4th line center and they filled it with an under-appreciated, cost effective NHL player in Winchester.

Of course no one could predict the devastating battle with concussion symptoms that Jesse Winchester would face. The center sustained a concussion during a preseason game against Calgary in 2014 and despite months of rehabilitation, practice, and even a return to preseason this past year, Winchester has never played a regular season game for the Avalanche and likely never will. This season Winchester is no longer around the team. He does not have a locker at the team’s practice facility and when asked about his status in November Patrick Roy answered grimly: “It’s over,” adding that Winchester would contact the team if his status changed but his priority now was getting healthy.

After another season with Marc Andre Cliche playing a significant role in the NHL the Avalanche have since done their due diligence in replacing Winchester with quality center depth. Now MacKinnon, Duchene, Soderberg, Grigorenko, Mitchell, and Wagner make for a formidable group down the middle.

But that doesn’t mean that Jesse Winchester’s injury doesn’t still hurt for the Avalanche.

According to General Fanager, after claiming defenseman Andrew Bodnarchuk off waivers Tuesday morning, the Avalanche now sit at 50 contracts, the limit for NHL teams. A quick look around the NHL will reveal that most teams elect to hover somewhere between 46 and 49 contracts to maintain roster flexibility. With 50 contracts on the books, the Avalanche cannot claim another player off waivers, sign a late season free agent (like Toronto did with Casey Bailey and Chicago did with Kyle Baun), or make any trade which acquires more players than it gives up. That may not seem like a big problem, but in a year where trying to make an NHL trade is akin to banging your head against a wall, GM’s need all the flexibility they can get.

The contract limit exists to protect players by preventing teams from signing more players than they can use across their NHL team and AHL/ECHL farm teams. The unintended consequence of that rule, however, is that it punishes teams for career ending injuries they couldn’t possibly foresee. Jesse Winchester was a healthy 30 year old with plenty of good years ahead of him when the Colorado Avalanche signed him to a short, responsible deal, but he will never play a game in an Avalanche uniform.

The Columbus Blue Jackets suffered a similar punishment for signing power forward Nathan Horton. Horton’s NHL career ended at the age of 29 thanks to a degenerative back condition and left the Blue Jackets on the hook for not just their financial commitment to Horton, but also for 6 more years of his contract spot on their roster. Instead of paying for the standard 23 NHL contracts, they’d have to pay for an extra 24th for 6 years all while losing the opportunity to sign one fewer free agent or draft pick for their development system. As a small market team with internal financial limitations, the Blue Jackets could not afford to pay a player who was never going to play and pay to replace him. 

The Blue Jackets were thus forced to absorb arguably the worst contract in the NHL: David Clarkson. They could afford to pay Horton ($5.3M) but not him and his replacement, so they decided that $5.25M was better spent on Clarkson simply because he would take the ice for the team. So far Clarkson has just 27 total points across the first three seasons of his contract. 

$5.3M a year on Nathan Horton was dead money for the Blue Jackets, but so far David Clarkson is barely kicking.  Of course the Jackets would rather have a healthy Nathan Horton, but injuries happen, what they needed was an out clause or insurance system through the NHL to take him off their books. They needed the opportunity to move forward with a clean slate.

Beyond all the financials and all the disappointment at losing Horton as a player and leader, Columbus had to deal with one last disadvantage. The injured winger would count for one of their 27 non-rostered contracts for the next 7 years. That’s 7 years without the flexibility to sign that one extra free agent, or take a chance on that one extra draft pick that could help an ailing team in a competitive league.

Of course NHL teams need to take care of players who suffer career ending injuries playing the sport, but they shouldn’t be punished for those players when they try to move forward on the ice. Facing down 2 years of a wasted contract on Jesse Winchester is one thing, but imagine the implications of a longer contract like Nathan Horton’s 6 remaining years, or a maximum length 8 year contract.

Professional athletes lead high risk lives with careers that can end on any given day and it doesn’t even take a dirty or reckless check to end it all. Any player’s career can end on an routine hit like the one that ended Winchester’s career or from a sudden, unpredictable medical issue like the blood clots which forced Pascal Dupuis into retirement earlier this year or the heart condition which took Steve Konowalchuk away from the Avalanche in 2006. 

There’s no question that players injured or medically unable to continue playing should earn their full paycheck and have their medical care provided by either the team that employs them or by the NHL itself, but the NHL should stop punishing teams’ capacity to adjust. Losing Jesse Winchester as a player and an asset was punishment enough for the Avalanche, continuing to hold his contract spot against them just adds insult to injury.

Notes: At Tuesday’s practice, head coach Patrick Roy revealed that defenseman Brad Stuart, who hasn’t played an NHL game since early November, remains out with “no timetable” for his return. Of course the Avalanche aren’t suggesting that Stuart’s injury is career-threatening, but, chronic back injuries are notoriously difficult for NHL players to recover from, especially at the ripe old age of 36. For the time being Brad Stuart looks a lot like Jesse Winchester, dead money and a dead contract slot sitting on IR for the foreseeable future.

Early in the season the Avalanche took steps to replace Jesse Winchester with waiver pickup Chris Wagner and now they’ve gone to the waiver wire again, replacing Brad Stuart with defenseman Andrew Bodnarchuk.  While Winchester’s contract with the Avalanche expires this summer, Brad Stuart’s extends to the 2017 offseason.