If Toews does play another season, what is his deal likely to look like?

• Player Overview
• What We Know
• Comparables
• Projection

Player Overview

Over the last decade and a half, Jonathan Toews has established himself as one of the most important players in Chicago Blackhawks history. He captained the team to three Stanley Cups, and took home individual awards including a Conn Smythe Trophy, a Selke Trophy and a Mark Messier Leadership Award.

However, the last few years didn’t go as anticipated for the Blackhawks. The team fell out of contention and are now firmly in a rebuild, going as far as to inform Toews he wouldn’t be brought back for the 2023-24 season.

Toews has seen a decline of his own as well. The center missed the entire 2020-21 season with long-COVID symptoms and hasn’t been the same since returning.

At this point, it seems Toews is still considering his future. There’s a good chance he’ll be in and out of the lineup going forward if he does return for another year and would likely only do so if it meant signing with a contender to go after another Stanley Cup.

What We Know

• Toews will reportedly not sign on July 1 and needs time to consider whether he wants to continue playing.

Comparables

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Given Toews is still considering whether he wants to play, along with his recent history of time out of the lineup, and a one-year deal is by far the most likely scenario for Toews.

1 YEAR

One option for a one-year deal would be for Toews to just take a regular deal with no performance bonuses, where the cap hit and AAV align.

That said, there’s a massive range of projections, based on comparables.

Nick Foligno and Corey Perry just signed matching $4M deals for one-year, so that’s a consideration. At the same time, Toews’ injury history points to the fact that he may not get close to that number on a deal.

While a one-year deal with no bonuses is tough to predict, Toews would likely end up on the low end of the range. Thornton’s $2M deal from 2019 would be a fairly good comparable.

The other, more likely option would be to take a deal which includes performance bonuses. Below, we listed out some examples of players taking deals that carried a low cap hit but were very heavy on performance bonuses. Each player’s cap hit and AAV have been adjusted to an $83.5M cap in the ‘Adjusted’ columns, with the applicable projection for Bergeron’s deal on the far right.

Most of the comparables project Toews around a $2M cap hit, with a different range for an AAV. That said, some of the more recent ones, between Pavelski, Bergeron and Perry would all have the bonuses putting him at a $4M AAV.

While it’s really tough to predict, it seems like a situation were we could maybe see a Bergeron-like deal, where the cap hit accounts for 50 percent of the AAV. We can assume Toews would only come back to join a contender as well, so this would give the team some flexibility in terms of structuring bonuses to maintain cap flexibility.

Projection

If Toews does return, we know it’ll almost certainly be on a one-year deal to chase another Cup.

Of course, if he just wants to win a Cup, he could take less money to sign with a team he wants to go to. Regardless though, there’s a good chance we see his deal come with a lower cap hit, as well as possibly including performance bonuses. As a result, we have his projected cap hit below, along with what the AAV could look like factoring in possible bonuses.