David Krejci is not Boston's No. 1 center.

You know that. I know that. The Bruins know that. Krejci knows that.

This, however, has not stopped the Bruins from consistently referring to him as such over the last few years, and at times treating him that way. One of the ways in which he has been treated as the team's No. 1 center is by getting more ice time per game last season, which was, frankly bizarre. Another is the fact that the Bruins just extended him for six years (starting in 2015-16) at a cap hit $7.25 million per. This makes him, ostensibly, the highest-paid Bruin, at least for a little while.

And so this raises a lot of questions, most of which start, and the first of which also ends, with one word: “Why?”

This is, however, more or less a semantic argument. Calling Krejci the No. 1 when for the most part deploying Bergeron as such doesn't really matter in actual practice. You could call Bergeron the No. 4 and if he still played top competition and produced like he does, he'd still be the actual No. 1. The fact is the Bruins have both of them.

Let's start with the easy part and say that David Krejci is about fourth on the team in terms of the value he delivers to Boston, in a best-case scenario.

Probably the most valuable is Tuukka Rask, because it's not every day you get a guy who can post save percentages a dozen points over the league average like clockwork. Rask is paid commensurately, with a $7 million contract he richly deserves. If anything, he delivers greater value than that in terms of on-ice performance, and is thus a bargain, and probably will be for some time to come. He is not merely a “product of the system.”

Next is what most would call a coin flip between either Patrice Bergeron or Zdeno Chara, who both earn $6.5 million against the cap, and will do so for eight and four more years, respectively. (For me, Bergeron is considerably more valuable than Chara; check the WOWYs.) Bergeron, having turned 29 slightly more than a month ago, is inarguably one of the best centers alive, whose value doesn't come in mere point totals, but in grinding every team's top line into dust. His contract is a moonshot home run for Peter Chiarelli. Likewise, Chara is the best defenseman of his generation, and even if he has lost a step in the last year or two, he is, at age 37, still a clear No. 1 defenseman to usurp those of most other teams in the league.

You have to pay for talent. And the Bruins have, unequivocally, both stocked up on and successfully retained it.

But then you get into a more nebulous area with Krejci, who's about to enter the final year of both a very productive, strong-value contract (three years at $5.25 million per), and several months after that, the final year of his 20s (he turns 29 in April). Not long after that, he will begin the first season of a six-year deal that will pay him what is currently the 20th-richest AAV in the league for that season (tied with Kris Letang, and a quarter-million dollars behind Pavel Datsyuk and Steven Stamkos). I would hope very much that no one assumes David Krejci is, was, or will be the 20th-best player in the league, or even something like that, but he nonetheless has significant value, and for Boston specifically.

The prevailing attitude in the wake of the deal's announcement was an unsurprised shrug. “What,” everyone asked simultaneously, “was Chiarelli supposed to do?” And that's the correct reaction. The Bruins couldn't let Krejci hit the market, or even think that was a possibility, because the likelihood that they could replace him via free agency wasn't that strong (Jason Spezza was the only other center worth having from next summer's center UFAs); by trade, it was non-existent. The argument that Krejci would have gotten more on the open market is likely also true, but no one has ever accused the July 1 signing rush as being a worthy-of-Webster's picture of market efficiency.

So the Bruins had to sign him, that much was obvious. And given that we live in the “post-Toews-and-Kane contracts” world, maybe $7.25 million doesn't seem like a crazy amount of money to pay for a fairly productive center. (Krejci is tied for 52nd in the league in points per game among centers with 400-plus games played since his rookie season in 2006-07, barely behind tied-for-47th Bergeron's 0.76.) It is, after all, 2014, and the cap is likely to keep going up for the next few years at least. If, in three years, it sits in the $80-82 million range — which is possible — then Krejci's cap hit could be as little as 8.8 percent of the total number. For 2015-16, that number stands to be considerably higher. At present, he occupies 7.6 percent, meaning this new deal constitutes a considerable raise both in terms of money and cap share, the latter of which is really how you have to look at deals these days.

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