It took a while, but after a negotiation that stretched into the first day of training camp, the Red Wings have finally secured their franchise defenseman with a new contract. Detroit has signed 23-year-old RHD Moritz Seider to a seven-year contract extension carrying an $8.55 million average annual value, the team announced Thursday.
The deal will take Seider to age 30 and gives the Red Wings a foundational piece of their blue line for the foreseeable future.
Here’s what you need to know.
What Seider means to the Red Wings
He’s their clear-cut No. 1 defenseman, a pillar of the team who I expect will one day wear a letter — and maybe soon. He hasn’t missed a single game yet in his three-year NHL career, making him the prototypical workhorse defenseman.
Last season, he took the toughest minutes of any NHL blueliner, according to data from The Athletic’s Dom Luszczyszyn, and while he had some understandable ups and downs in those minutes, it speaks to Detroit’s trust in him to take on that kind of role at such a young age. He has also maintained a relatively high offensive floor with back-to-back 42-point seasons — despite diminished power play time last season with Shayne Gostisbehere in town.
Put simply, Seider is Detroit’s present and future on the blue line. He’s going to be one of the faces of the team for years to come.
Why a long-term deal makes sense for Detroit
Getting Seider locked up long-term gives the Red Wings certainty on what he will cost on their cap sheet for the foreseeable future. This deal follows recent long-term extensions for fellow top young blueliners Brock Faber (eight years at $8.5 million per year), Owen Power (seven years at $8.35 million per year) and Jake Sanderson (eight years at $8.05 million per year), and Seider’s track record to date trumps all three of those players.
IT’S MO-TOWN, BABY 🙌
The #RedWings have signed Moritz Seider to a seven-year contract with an AAV of $8,550,000. pic.twitter.com/WuZRSGRC3z
— Detroit Red Wings (@DetroitRedWings) September 19, 2024
Detroit would have probably liked to get an eighth year here, but after Faber’s contract became a comparable earlier this summer, the price on a maximum-term extension may have been a bit too high for the Red Wings — though it’s hard to know exactly what Seider and his representation would have wanted on that kind of term.
The deal will expire at the same time as Dylan Larkin’s eight-year extension that was signed in 2023, and one year before Lucas Raymond’s new extension.
On the $8.55 million AAV
Seider’s deal eats up nearly all of Detroit’s remaining cap space, with just about $200,000 remaining for 2024-25. But by coming in under Larkin’s $8.7 million AAV, the Red Wings would appear to have functionally created an internal cap ceiling in the near term.
That can always change with time, especially as the NHL salary cap continues to rise. But for at least the next few years, it will take a high bar for a Red Wings defenseman to be able to ask for more money than Seider, or a forward to seek more than Larkin.
How this deal can deliver value for Detroit
It should age into good value organically, with a rising cap that should steadily push up the prices for big-minute defenders in the coming years. To get the most out of it, though, the Red Wings will want Seider to continue to improve upon the path he’s already on: being a two-way horse that they count on to tilt their ice in their favor.
In many ways, Detroit’s top ask of Seider will likely always be those tough matchups and shutting down top opponents. It’s a tough job, and one he’ll need to continue to master, but thriving in it is well within his capability.
When teams sign defensemen for this kind of term and money, though, they’re also hoping to get significant offense out of the deal. And while Seider’s half-point-per-game outputs the last two years are strong for his role, in a perfect world Detroit would probably like to see him get back to, or above, the 50-point output he had as a rookie over the life of this deal. More top power-play time would help that pursuit, and that’s possible this season with Gostisbehere now out of the picture.
(Photo: Gregory Shamus / Getty Images)
