John Tavares is considering “everything” before signing a contact extension with the Islanders, and that includes going into this season without a new deal in place.
The captain explicitly said so when asked on the phone Wednesday by The Post during a late-summer check in.
“Yea, I am,” Tavares said. “I think if I’m signing just to stop the conversation, I don’t think it’s really the right way of going about things. All I can do is control what I can control, be the best player I can be, work as hard as I can and try to be the best captain I can be.”
Tavares will turn 27 on Sept. 20 and is signed for next season at a club-friendly $5.5 million salary-cap hit. He could have signed an extension as early as July 1, but that was also the opening of free agency and soon after the draft, when general manager Garth Snow had stockpiled a handful of high picks in the hopes of making a deal to improve his team immediately.
The captain thought it was best to let Snow focus on the roster rather than his situation, with no urgency to him signing a new deal.
“I think I wanted to just let Garth and management focus on that more than my situation, as there is still time to continue my process,” Tavares said. “You look down the road, but at the same time, you don’t want to be thinking about that or worrying about that on a daily basis.”
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What Tavares has made clear over the past year is that he has a genuine desire to stay with the Islanders, who likely will have to meet Connor McDavid’s eight-year, $100 million deal ($12 million annual salary-cap hit) to reach market value. But Tavares also wants to be diligent beyond the money when making this monumental decision, which falls in line with his personality.
“I think you know your window as a professional athlete is very small,” he said. “I’m fortunate to have played as long as I have now, and really coming into a great time in my career, and that window is very small, so you want to take advantage of that.”
Besides the contract terms and what Snow is doing to make the roster most attractive to win now, Tavares also has to think about the wobbling arena situation being dealt with by second-year majority owners Jon Ledecky and Scott Malkin.
“Obviously with my situation and making a decision for possibly another eight years, you want to have an idea of things viewed in the long term and the short term,” Tavares said. “I think you want to know everything, not just about the arena situation, but I think everything.”
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The Islanders are entering their third year of a distasteful marriage with Brooklyn’s Barclays Center, and Ledecky and Malkin will undoubtedly submit a proposal for development of a new arena near Belmont Park sometime before the Sept. 28 deadline set forth by New York State. By this coming January, they are going to opt out of their 25-year lease at Barclays Center, and going forward, their home is unknown.
“Obviously there’s a lot of discussion about the arena and trying to make things better — [make it] work at Barclays, or find a situation that works better for the Islanders,” Tavares said. “So obviously there’s a lot up in the air, there’s a lot in play on that side. A lot of that I can’t control, so I don’t try to worry about that too much.”
The organization knows how important it is to get Tavares signed long term, which is why he has been kept in the loop on all fronts, from the arena to Snow’s personnel decisions. But he is not rushing to make his decision, keeping the future of the franchise even more in flux.
“Everyone’s situation is different,” Tavares said. “It’s always not just a perfect science, and these things take time and I think that’s my personality, too. There’s no reason to rush things. I think it’s just important to be in good contact with everybody and just focus on the season.”
At this point, that’s easier said than done.