Thoughts on Tarasenko, Saad, Yahoo’s new DFS platform, and whether Mikael Granlund can put it all together. 

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The biggest news of the last few days is obviously the re-signing of Vladimir Tarasenko by the St. Louis Blues. Tarasenko was a restricted free agent, but signed an eight-year contract with an average annual value of $7.5-million. Tarasenko followed up a 21-goal, 43-point 2013-2014 campaign with a 37-goal, 73-point season this past year. He also has 10 playoff goals in his last 11 playoff games, and scored six of his team's 14 goals in their first round exit this year.

There are a lot of ways to look at this contract. The first being, this is a very rich RFA contract. There are comparisons to Ryan O'Reilly's contract that was signed recently, but there are a couple of distinctions here, too. One is that O'Reilly's was a seven-year deal, not eight. Small difference, but it's an extra year of control if things work out well at the back end of the deal. The second distinction is that O'Reilly would have been set to be an unrestricted free agent at the end of his bridge deal next year, so a larger AAV was to be expected than if there were just three or four years of UFA time being bought. Whether O'Reilly is deserving of that deal isn't the point, but rather whether the two can be compared. I don't think it's really fair.