By now you may have seen that the Capitals have re-signed defenseman John Erskine. What you may not have seen is that Erskine was inked to a two year deal worth a total of $2.5 million dollars.

I respect John Erskine a great deal. He’s a great team player, he always hustles, he gives up the body to block shots, and he’s more than willing to drop the gloves (and not half bad at it). But he’s also a painfuly slow skater and a poor puckhandler who, at twenty-eight, isn’t likely to get all that much better. He also takes far more penalties than anyone else on the Capitals: with thirty-six minors in fifty-six games last year, Erskine was taking .71 minor penalties per game. The next more frequently offer was Alexander Semin who picked .34 minor penalties per game, meaning Erskine was send to the box for minor penalties more than twice as often as anyone else on the team.  Some of those may have been roughing penalties due to his style of play but I’d be willing to bet the vast majority were holding, hooking, tripping, or puck-over-the-glass.

Aside from Erskine’s shortcomings as a defenseman (more on that can be found here), there doesn’t seem to be a great deal of need at the defense position for the Capitals. Mike Green and Tom Poti are signed through next year. The team controls, to varying degrees, the status of Jeff Schultz, Shaone Morrisonn, and Milan Jurcina, all of whom are, despite their struggles at times, better options than Erskine. Meanwhile the team expects blue-chip prospect Karl Alzner to be in Washington by season’s end, and fellow Hershey Bear Sami Lepisto is also playing well.

But the biggest problem with this contract isn’t the depth the Capitals have or that they want to have Erskine back - after all, you can never have too many defensemen and Erskine is good enough to be at least a seventh or eight defenseman in the NHL. The problem is that the contract is completely irreconcilable with what it would take to keep Erskine if he were to hit the free agent market. If the Capitals decided the wanted to re-sign Erskine next summer, fine. But I have a hard time believing any other NHL team is going to shell out $1.25 million a year for a guy who should only get in when someone else is hurt. If I’m wrong, I’m wrong, but it still seems like the Capitals have paid Erskine at least fifty percent more than he could have gotten somewhere else.

There is one, and only one, possible rationale I can think of for this signing: that the team plans to move Erskine to the wing and have him play the role of enforcer in coming seasons. It might sound crazy, but then Donald Brashear will be thirty-seven at the start of next season and if there’s anyone slower than Erskine on the team, it’s him. The Capitals don’t have any NHL-calibre enforcers in their minor league system - Grant McNeill’s the only enforcer in Hershey and he’s spent most of his career in the ECHL.

The idea of moving a defenseman to forward and into an enforcer role is not uncommon: Paul Bissonnette, Patrick Kaleta, Wade Brookbank, Wade Belak, and Eric Godard are all examples of players who successfully made the transition from rugged defenseman to winger-enforcer, as is former Capital Stephen Peat, although each of these players did it at a younger age than Erskine.

Would a move to wing work for Erskine? My guess would be that it would, and not just because I’ve often found myself thinking that Erskine could have carved out a nice career for himself if a coach had decided to move him to wing as a twenty-one year old. On the wing Erskine would have to opportunity to play his game, hitting opponents without having to worry as much about whether or not he’s drawing himself out of position and getting into scraps without forcing his team to alter the defensive rotation. He wouldn’t be an every game player, but he could still be a valuable one by playing a role similar to the one played by Aaron Downy for the Detroit Red Wings last season.

That said, on a final note, I’d like to point out that Erskine as an enforcer playing the wing, still probably isn’t worth $1.25 million a year. But my goal here was to provide a possible explanation for the logic of the Capitals’ front office, not to try and defend the decision.