Montreal Canadiens' P.K. Subban signs souvenirs at the team's training facility Saturday, May 31, 2014 in Brossard, Quebec. The Canadiens were eliminated from the NHL hockey Stanley Cup playoffs by the New York Rangers in Game 6 of the Eastern Conference final on Thursday, May 29. (AP Photo/The Canadian Press, Paul Chiasson)

Having gone through the last few seasons such as he did, there's not much point in arguing that P.K. Subban is now one of the absolute best defensemen in the league. Even leaving aside the fact that he won a Norris, essentially as a reward for being a scoring machine on the power play, there are few guys put in worse team-related situations over the last four seasons who have been as good as Subban.

The Canadiens have generally not been great for most of Subban's career; they have only 150 wins in 294 games since he became a full-time player. Their possession numbers have generally been subpar — score-close corsi over the last four seasons of 49.3 percent — but despite this fact, Subban has generally been very good. He's 21st in the league among defensemen with 2,500 minutes in those situations, at 52 percent. And most of the guys ahead of him have played for possession juggernauts like Los Angeles, Detroit, Boston, Chicago, St. Louis, Vancouver, New Jersey, and San Jose.

(The interesting outliers here: Dustin Byfuglien in Winnipeg, Brian Campbell in Florida, and Alex Goligoski in Dallas.)

But of course, when it comes to defensemen, many analysts and teams alike fall into the trap of judging defensemen based on their point totals. Here too, Subban is in a rare group of guys; he's seventh in scoring among just 13 defensemen to break 150 points over the last four seasons. The number of guys ahead of him on both this list and the one related to possession is four: Duncan Keith, Alex Pietrangelo, Erik Karlsson, and Byfuglien.

(Aside: Dustin Byfuglien is probably the most underrated defenseman in the NHL; second in blue line scoring and 17th in score-close possession, with an unremittingly awful team, since 2010-11. He's never finished higher than seventh in Norris voting and is constantly mentioned in trade rumors. Baffling.)

So Subban is a world-class defenseman. Easily top-10 in the league, and at 25 he still has miles to go before he is no longer a useful player. And it just so happens he's up for a new contract after the expiration of his low-cost bridge deal — which was forced on him following a holdout — in Montreal. And that leads one to wonder what he's worth.

He's still only a restricted free agent, and thus any long-term contract he signs this summer isn't, perhaps, going to be as high as if he were to hit the open market, but nonetheless it seems the Canadiens are going to have to go pretty deep into pocket to lock him up. Doing anything else is a fool's errand.

There were rumors back around the middle of the season that when the discussions begin, Subban will be walking up to the table asking for between $8 million and $9 million a season, probably for as long as the Habs can possibly give him (that'd be eight years). That would make him the highest-paid defenseman in the league against the cap, only slightly ahead of Shea Weber's nearly $7.86 million a season until 2026. There are currently nine players in the league carrying a cap hit of $8 million or more, and all but Henrik Lundqvist are forwards. But if Shea Weber can get $7.86 million — albeit on an offer sheet, and for 14 seasons under the old CBA — then you have to say that Subban is worth just about as much as that, especially with the consideration that the cap is only going to go up in the coming years; within a few seasons, $8 million might only be 10 percent of the ceiling, and getting a clear top-10 defenseman for that kind of hit is a high value.

The Habs really only have one other player that's going to be able to command anything resembling a star player's salary within the next handful of years (unless they really love Max Pacioretty, signed through 2019 at $4.5 million per, more than they should), and that's Carey Price, who already makes $6.5 million and will do so until 2018. The point being that the Habs will basically be able to give Subban a blank check if they so choose.

They, of course, will not. Very few players get to write their own tickets, and defensemen are not really included among that list. Alex Ovechkin can get what he wants. Evgeni Malkin can. Sidney Crosby can. Henrik Lundqvist can. Probably Steven Stamkos can. The list ends there. But if a certain report — incredible is what it is, if we're being honest — is to be believed, Subban doesn't want a lot of money at all.

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