Chicago Blackhawks defenseman Brent Seabrook has the 10th-highest cap hit of any blue liner in the NHL this season. His contract doesn’t expire until after the 2023-24 season. On Tuesday night, he’ll be a healthy scratch against the Ottawa Senators.
It’s fair to say this isn’t how the Blackhawks or Seabrook envisioned things going after he signed an eight-year, $55 million contract extension in 2015. At the time, the team was coming off its third Stanley Cup in six years, and re-signing Seabrook kept him away from unrestricted free agency the following summer.
The decision to retain Seabrook wasn’t surprising to anyone in Chicago, but right from the beginning, the price tag raised eye brows. A $6.875 million cap hit for a non-elite defenseman through his age-39 season seemed ill-advised at the time. Now, it looks like one of the worst contracts in hockey.
And that decline reached a new low Tuesday with the decision to healthy scratch Seabrook. Duncan Keith is now the only member of the Blackhawks defense not to be healthy scratched at some point this season
“We’ve had eight defensemen all year, and six of them have all missed games,” head coach Joel Quenneville said after practice Tuesday, via the Chicago Sun-Times. “A lot of times, some guys aren’t deserving when they do sit out. We felt that the other guys were deserving of playing tonight’s game and we think it [will be] a very limited experience for [Seabrook] tonight. We expect him to get back in there.”
It’s never a good sign when a player gets healthy scratch, but particularly in a situation like this. It would be one thing for it to be happening late in the contract after Seabrook gave the Hawks several years of quality performance. Lots of long-term contracts are signed with the full knowledge that the backend of the deal might not go particularly well, but you’re hoping to make up for that on the front end.
However, Seabrook is in just the second year of his contract. He’s going to carry a cap hit near $7 million through 2023-24. He has a full no-movement clause until July 1, 2022, too.
And on Tuesday, Seabrook will be sitting in the press box while his teammates, many of whom make far less than him, will be gutting it out against the Senators. That contract is going to feel very long for fans in Chicago.