Montreal Canadiens winger Artturi Lehkonen has elected to file for arbitration. The Habs forward is a restricted free agent and will go to arbitration if the team and his agent can’t come to an agreement in the near future.
The Montreal Canadiens have a bit of an enigma on their hands with Artturi Lehkonen. The winger plays an exceptional two-way game, is a solid penalty killer, makes very few mistakes in the run of a game and can play up and down the lineup.
The only problem is, when you search for his name on the scoresheet, you have a hard time locating him. He appears to do everything right on the ice, but the results just do not show up in the form of goals and assists.
When a player and their team do go to arbitration, they meet with a third party and both the player and their team present their case and their desired salary for the upcoming season. The third party takes both cases into account and then usually just meets in the middle anyway.
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Last year, 44 players filed for arbitration. Only four players actually went through with the process and the other 40 settled on a new contract before a third party needed to be involved. So, there is a strong chance that Lehkonen re-signs before they go to arbitration, but if not, he has a case to ask for a sizeable raise on his entry level contract that just finished.
Lehkonen did not take long to earn a role on the team’s penalty kill. In his rookie season of 2016-17, he scored 18 goals and 28 points in 73 games played. His offence dipped in year two as he scored just 12 goals and 21 points in 66 games. This season, Lehkonen bounced back a bit, scoring 11 goals and 31 points in 82 contests.
Lehkonen is going to point to Andreas Athanasiou’s recent contract with the Detroit Red Wings when he makes his case in arbitration. Athanasiou finished his entry-level deal a year ago when he was 23 years old. Lehkonen turned 24 yesterday. Athanasiou had 33 points, Lehkonen just had 31. Athanasiou played a big role on the Wings power play and helped out on the penalty kill. Lehkonen has a huge role on the Habs penalty kill and chips in on the power play as well.
Athanasiou signed a two-year extension with the Red Wings with a $3 million cap hit. Lehkonen will say he deserves the same.
The Canadiens will point to Nick Ritchie’s recent contract extension with the Anaheim Ducks. In 2017-18 he scored ten goals and 27 points in 76 games. That is one less goal and four less points in six less games than Lehkonen’s contract season.
Ritchie actually held out to start the next season, but ultimately signed a three-year contract with a cap hit just under $1.5 million. The Habs will point to the stats and say Lehkonen and Ritchie should have the same cap hit.
The arbitrator will look at these two requests and decide since Ritchie was not much of a factor on special teams, that Lehkonen’s contract should come in between the two asks, but ever so slightly closer to the Athanasiou contract.
Based on this, Lehkonen should be awarded a one-year deal with a cap hit of $2.35 million for next season. The Habs will gladly accept and keep their solid two-way winger, hoping he can find a bit more consistency offensively and bring his goal total closer to 20 than 10 next season.