(Photo Credit: Rob Schneidmiller, Ice Time Southwest)

Pavel Dorofeyev has been lighting the lamp with regularity this season, and it couldn’t be coming at a better time for his future bank account. The 25-year-old former 3rd round pick is set to become a restricted free agent (RFA) with arbitration rights, which means he’s primed to cash in on what will likely be his second straight 30-goal season.

Dorofeyev has signed three contracts in his time with the Golden Knights. The first was a standard entry-level deal, which paid him the max allowed by the CBA, including a few performance bonuses that he did not hit. The second was a one-year $825,000 deal following his first true stint in the NHL, in which he scored seven goals in 18 games. He battled through injuries that season but still managed a strong 13 goals in 47 games, setting himself up nicely for his final RFA contract before arbitration.

That one came in at two-years $3.67 million for an AAV of $1.835 million. It represented about 2% of the salary cap for a player who has gone on to score 61 goals in 139 games, leading all Golden Knights by a wide margin and good for 18th in the entire NHL, one goal ahead of Sidney Crosby and Connor McDavid and two in front of Auston Matthews.

There’s simply no way around it: Dorofeyev is in for not just a raise, but the most significant bump in pay for any Golden Knight ever.

Like in real estate, one of the best ways to project a future contract is via comps. The same way a 3-bedroom 2.5-bath house in Summerlin is compared against others, Dorofofeyev’s 81 goals and 129 points in 206 career games will be measured against others who have posted similar numbers in the NHL.

The best resource for doing this is AFP Analytics, a consulting firm that parses through the data the exact same way NHL agents do in order to come up with reasonable contract projections.

They have presented two options for Dorofeyev’s next contract: a short-term deal and a long-term deal.

Long-term: 6-years, $8.465m AAV
Short-term: 2-years, $5.649 AAV

The long-term deal would represent 8.14% of the Golden Knights’ cap in 26-27. That’s similar to what Tomas Hertl, Shea Theodore, and Noah Hanifin are currently taking up. It would put Dorofeyev in line with many of the other 30-goal scorers in the NHL and it would lock him in Vegas through 2032.

The short-term deal is extremely interesting for the Golden Knights as it would continue to give them flexibility to add to the roster while having the leading goal scorer under a decent contract. The problem is that when it expires, Dorofeyev would become an unrestricted free agent (UFA) and would be able to be courted by all 31 other teams. That would likely mean an even more significant jump in pay if he posts a few more offensively productive seasons.

Of course, Vegas has done well convincing their own players to take a bit less to stay in Vegas and that may well happen once again here with Dorofyev, but with arbitrating rights in his back pocket, his next contract is going to cost The Creator a pretty penny.

**You can find all of AFP Analytics contract projections here.**