St. Louis Blues' T.J. Oshie and Toronto Maple Leafs' Cody Franson go after the puck during the first period of an NHL hockey game Saturday, Jan. 17, 2015, in St. Louis. (AP Photo/Billy Hurst)

The apparent sticking point in all these Cody Franson negotiations, which have stretched on impossibly long to this point, is that Franson would like a team to sign him for more than one year. Not that he's hard-lining that, but it's definitely a preference.

And the thing is, teams should be falling all over themselves to give him that kind of term.

Franson is 27 years old and to all appearances greatly helps his team. In a lot of respects, he could be considered a high-end No. 3 defenseman or a low-end No. 2. This despite being on rotten Toronto teams for the last three seasons and generally having a lot asked of him. He pushes positive possession, suppresses opponents' shot attempts, generally outscores the other team, and so on. He also makes the teammates with whom he shares the ice post better numbers than they do without him. In short, Franson looks like a defenseman who should be pulling what you'd consider to be, say, Brooks Orpik money. Maybe that's not a good example, so here's a better one: Young(er) Andrei Markov.

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Markov was 30 years old for most of the 2008-09 season, and continued to get huge-money deals that took up a significant portion of the cap even after the contract under which he played that year ($5.75 million AAV, 11.4 percent of the cap when it began in 2007-08; equivalent to an $8.16 million hit now). That paid him until he was 32. And obviously, Markov's 20s were better than Franson's. No one's saying they weren't. Thus, he “earned” that huge deal — and even one of the two subsequent ones — based on the reputation he rightly garnered as a very good defenseman over several years prior to signing it.

But if you're matching and in some cases bettering a Markov in the beginning of his decline, you're still pretty damn good.

Now, obviously, there are some caveats here. Teams haven't really spent their money all that wisely in the past, and that leads to cap crunches. For instance, the Bruins are a team that is constantly talked about as being a potential landing spot (mainly because they need more than one top-four defenseman on their roster), but we all know how the Bruins' cap situation is. Fair enough. Teams can't spend money they don't have. But as for the ones that are worried about term, well, it seems a little crazy. If you can sign a 28-year-old guy until he's, say, 31 or 32, that's not likely to end up looking too bad even if his decline starts right at his age-30 season. At that point, you may not be too excited to be paying such a player $4-5 million (5.6-7 percent of the cap) but it's not an unbearable load for a guy who starts out at this talent threshold.

Teams were more than happy to splash the cash on Zybnek Michalek ($3.2 million AAV for two years), Francois Beauchemin ($4.5 million for three), and Paul Martin ($4.85 million for four), Franson should be in that conversation as well. It was a soft D market this summer, no question about that, but it didn't stop some guys from getting paid. So it leads one to wonder what all the tire-kicking on Franson is about.

Some of it, I think, is that the Predators didn't seem to like him very much once they paid through the nose for him ahead of the trade deadline, and consequently let him walk without making much of an attempt to bring him back.