The Ottawa Senators have locked up another one of their pending unrestricted free agents.
Mike Condon has signed a three year contract with the Senators that will pay him an average of $2.4 mil per season. He’ll earn $1.7 mil in the first season, $2.5 mil on year two and an even $3 million in the final year of the contract.
While his season had some ups and downs, Condon was a huge reason the Senators made the playoffs last year. His ability to step up in Craig Anderson’s absence and give the team reliable goaltending was huge for the Senators.
The contract is structured in a way that Condon’s salary increases significantly each year. With Craig Anderson in the twilight of his career, the Senators obviously wanted a little bit of certainty at the position for the next few years.
Whether or not Condon provides that certainty is a point of contention among Sens fans. While his numbers don’t exactly jump off the page (2.50 GAA and .914 sv%), Condon gave the Senators stability in net during a difficult point in their season.
But if you look closely at his numbers, they are anything but consistent. When he was good, he was really good. But when he struggled, his game looked pretty rough. It’s like that with a lot of goalies but the problem with Condon is there isn’t exactly a long track record of NHL success to fall back on.
At 27 years of age, there’s reason to believe Condon still has room to grow as a goalie. In both Montreal and Ottawa, he was thrown into a difficult situation and faced with a pretty ridiculous workload. With more reasonable playing time, there’s reason to believe he can put up even better number than he did last season.
The contract is probably a year longer than would have been ideal and the average higher than you’d expect for a back up goalie but as a pending UFA, Condon was in a position where he had all the leverage.
Condon had already received some interest from other teams (as many as 11 according to Garrioch) leading up to July 1st but clearly his priority was to sign with the Senators.
The official news release is here.
