The good news about the Justin Abdelkader extension — seven years with a $4.25 million AAV — is that everyone except Ken Holland immediately thought it was ludicrous.

The bad news is that the Red Wings are now stuck with it for the next seven years. But one supposes that “bad” is a relative term which depends entirely upon your point of view.

If, for example, you are a player of middling quality who is approaching free agency this summer, then this contract is great news. Because if a guy like Abdelkader can get a team to fork over seven years, paying him until he's 36 years old(!), then it's very likely that anyone can. This contract skews the free agent market so precipitously that it's going to be tough for any general manager to argue Half-Decent Player X shouldn't get at least five years.

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You don't even have to get into everyone's favorite advanced stats to realize this contract was immediately garbage.

The big popular thing that went around in the immediate aftermath of the contract being pre-announced by the usual insiders on Twitter was this from Dmitri Filipovic:

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Player A in this scenario is David Clarkson, while Abdelkader is obviously Player B. As you can see, they are similarly unimpressive players who had one good year and cashed in big-time. And no, $4.25 million is not $5.25 million, which is what Clarkson got from Toronto in signing the worst contract in the league. But the money was always a secondary (though still major) concern when compared with the term, which was insane. Crash-and-bang wingers, which is what you'd have to say both were for the majority of their careers before massive shooting percentages propelled them inexplicably to “useful power forward” status.

Obviously this is a comparable contract, even if Holland didn't go way overboard on money. He still went overboard, a which will be elucidated in a minute, but this is 100 percent just a GM buying one season's worth of surprising, percentage-fueled performance as an indicator of future potential, rather than an aberration versus past results. To wit, there's this from Holland when he announced the deal:

Ken Holland on Justin Abdelkader 7y $29.75M deal: "He's 28 years of age. It's hard to find big people that can score 20 goals." — Helene St. James (@HeleneStJames) November 12, 2015

You know how you know it's hard? Justin Abdelkader, the big person who can score 20 goals, has only done it once in his career, and boy did he need a lot of help. Last season he scored 23 goals in 71 games, but that was because he played 80 percent of his minutes at 5-on-5 with Henrik Zetterberg. It's usually pretty easy to do that when your coach is Mike Babcock and your linemate is Zetterberg and you're also getting power play time with some of Detroit's other high-skill players, like Pavel Datsyuk and Gustav Nyquist. Indeed, eight of his 23 goals last season (almost 35 percent) came on the man advantage, as did 14 of his 44 points (close to 32 percent).

Now, you can say that Abdelkader scored 10 in 48 during the lockout-shortened season, but he did that by shooting 10.4 percent, so that too is well outside the realm of what is reasonable for his skill level. His only other double-digit goal performance came in 70 games in 2013-14, when he scored 10.

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