The Carolina Hurricanes extended franchise cornerstone Sebastian Aho to an eight-year, $78 million contract on Wednesday.
The Carolina Hurricanes will have Sebastian Aho for at least the next nine seasons after the team announced that they had reached an agreement on an eight-year, $78 million contract extension, the largest deal in team history.
Aho, who is coming off of a 36 goal and 67 point season, has been the team's leading scorer in five of his seven seasons in league and has led the team in goals in six straight seasons.
Following the news, Aho and Hurricanes general manager Don Waddell spoke with the media via Zoom Wednesday afternoon. Here's what they had to say:
On the value of Sebastian Aho: If you look five years ago, we were starting to build and if you look at the pieces we were starting to put in place, Sebastian’s absolutely our number one piece. That’s not knocking any other players, because we have some great players, but Sebastian has been there each and every night throughout the regular season and the playoffs and when you’re building your team, we all know Sebastian as a great player, but he’s a great person too, and those are the kinds of people you want to surround yourself with because when times get tough, these kinds of players dig down and make it happen for you. So this was an easy decision for us to sign Sebastian to eight years and we’re very pleased.
On getting the deal done a year early: For us, knowing how important Sebastian is for our organization, to get this done and not have to sit on it all year and then not having to try and figure out something for the following year, it was critical for us to get this done this summer. To put it behind us so nobody has to worry about it now. We know we have Sebastian for the next nine years. It was a goal of ours as an organization to get this done quickly.
On locking up core pieces: We’ve gone five years making the playoffs and I think we’re right there in the heart of our window to keep moving forward. When you surround yourself with all these good young players - and nothing against our older players like Jordan [Staal] and Brent [Burns] - but it’s nice to have these young guys locked up for a contract knowing that we can continue to move forward. When you look at our forward group and having a number of guys that we’ve signed with Andrei [Svechnikov] and Jesperi [Kotkaniemi] and we’ll have [Seth] Jarvis coming up and Marty Necas coming up here, you lock these guys up for the long term and so you put yourself in a great position. Then you can work around the edges to fill out the holes that you need but you know you have your key pieces in place. I think we’re a franchise that doesn’t want to try to win just one Cup, we want to try and win ten Cups. You’ve gotta put yourself in a position to compete for the Cup every year and we think we can do that for numerous years coming up.
On his views on the team's offseason in general: When you go into the offseason, you always look at what you’d like to add to your team and what you’d like to do. We think we’ve had a really good offseason. Not only signing the players from our team last year that we needed to bring back, but also the new additions in the free agents we added. My job as the general manager is to stay on the phone everyday and continue to look and see if we can make our team better. Hard to do right now as we’re pretty close to the cap. We’ve got a little bit of money right now, but it’s only July. I can’t say anything will happen between now and the start of the season, but certainly we’ll continue to talk to different teams and free agents and see what shakes out here in the next six weeks or so.
On the status of negotiations on the team’s other 2024 free agents: We’ve reached out to most of the guys who will be free agents after next year and have had conversations, but nothing close on any of them. Obviously there’s a different market for different players and we’d like to keep our best players, but unfortunately there is a salary cap which we all know about. We’re not a budget team and we’re fortunate to have an owner who’ll spend whatever the league will allow us to spend. We’ve had some initial talks but we’re not close on anything right now.
