Torrey Mitchell being awesome, like always

I am in the middle of writing my extremely belated analysis on the Ehrhoff/Lukowich trade, but I felt this garnered an immediate posting.

According to capgeek.com, Torrey Mitchell was signed to a 3 year, $4.1M deal, giving him around $1.3666M per year. While he only played a total of 4 games last season, including both pre- and post-season, he still brought a positive impact to the team. Seriously, besides Boyle, Mitchell was often the only guy to show up in the playoffs. He crashed into corners, skating as hard as he can, seemingly fearless despite being injured with a broken leg all year.

He’s my absolute favorite player on the Sharks despite his career line of 11-12-23 (playoffs and regular season). He’s fast, he’s reckless, he’s good in the faceoff, and he is clutch on the PK. Did I mention he’s fast? Honestly, I’d bet that he could beat a healthy Gaborik in a race. That’s how fast he is.

While the per-year amount may be questionable for a guy that has only played one full season in his career, the fact that he’s now locked up until 27 is a good thing. He’s only going to get better, and its extremely likely that he’ll end up out-playing his contract. Hell, if he puts in a Talbot-like performance in the playoffs he will out-play it.

One of the few moments he had last year was during the playoffs. He dumped the puck into the offensive end, skated in and dug it out against a Ducks defender into the other corner, skated over there and dug it out again, made a sweet pass to Goc right in the slot, who immediately heeled the shot and missed the net. That was either Mitchell’s first or second game all year, I forget which.

Oh, and of course there’s this goal from 2007-08:

Basically, Torrey Mitchell is awesome and deserves every bit of this contract, I don’t care what the nay-sayers say.