Utah had until Wednesday to exercise its right of first refusal on Hayton, per section 10.3 of the NHL Collective Bargaining Agreement. If the Mammoth had decided not to match the contract, they would have received a second-round draft pick as compensation.
“It wasn’t a quick decision,” Armstrong said. “It was a decision we went into and we went down every rabbit hole we could to look at every different scenario with young kids coming in, the ability to not be able to trade a player, how does that affect (the team), the player being able to walk at the end of the year.
“We went down every rabbit hole we could to think of every possible scenario that could come our way, and at the end of the day, we love Barrett Hayton. You have to remember one thing about our team in a sense that we’ve had so many picks. We probably in the last five years might lead the NHL in picks. We don’t need as many picks as we did back in the day for the rebuild. Now we’ve got good players coming in. What we need, and you can see this in the NHL with the trades that occurred for Bo Byram, and top-end picks traded for players, everybody in the NHL wants to win right now. Everybody in the NHL wants 26-year-olds with experience. With Barrett Hayton and what he’s done and all the underlying numbers behind the scenes, that’s what they want. They want an experienced player. It takes a while for a center to be good at center in the National Hockey League, and he’s just getting into his prime.”