Washington Capitals defender Dmitry Orlov will see his six-year, $5.1 million AAV deal expire this summer. As the team struggles for playoff position, two insiders are now reporting that Orlov’s camp and Washington’s office are also struggling to agree on an extension.

The issue, it seems, is term.

In his column for The Athletic, Pierre LeBrun said an extension is not imminent.

The Capitals have had contract talks with pending UFA Dmitry Orlov, but it sounds like term is a significant issue. Unless one side or the other softens, there won’t be an extension any time soon.

The 31-year-old, top-four defenseman is in the last season of a six-year deal carrying a $5.1 million average annual value.

I haven’t heard his name mentioned anywhere in trade talks because I don’t believe that’s something the Caps are trying to push out there. They’re focused on making the playoffs and want him part of it.

In Friday morning’s 32 Thoughts podcast, Elliotte Friedman said negotiations with Orlov and the team’s general struggles could prompt some big changes:

I think they have a chance to be one of the most interesting teams all of a sudden at the deadline. They’ve made signings – they signed Strome, they signed Milano, I hear they’re trying to sign Orlov although [. . .] I’m always careful about this stuff because things can chance – but I had some people tell me it was proving to be a challenge.

There’s still a couple weeks so you never know where this goes, but if the Capitals decide, ‘hey, I don’t like this’ and ‘we want to create some roster flexibility’, they’ve got some pieces that they could put out there that I think could be really interesting to some other teams. They have a chance to be low-key one of the really fascinating teams of this deadline.

Orlov, 31, missed most of November and the start of December with a lower-body injury. He has scored 3 goals and 16 assists in his 41 games, ranking fourth among defenders in points. According to Evolving Hockey’s standings-points-above-replacement statistic, he’s having the worst season of his career.

In this visualization above, each of Orlov’s seasons is a colored circle. The higher the circle, the more standings points the player has contributed to his team compared to a replacement-level player. The clusters of white dots shows the general distribution of all players for each of those seasons.

The NHL trade deadline is on March 3.

Headline photo: Alan Dobbins/RMNB