Red Wings working on long-term deal with DeKeyser, negotiating with Mrazek

The Detroit Red Wings are coming down to the wire with two of their young stars set to go to arbitration.

The Red Wings will get a third-party decision on Thursday regarding Danny DeKeyser's next contract, unless both sides are able to come to an agreement first.

"Ideally, Danny would like to do a longer-term deal. The club would like to do a longer-term deal," general manager Ken Holland said, according to Brendan Savage of MLive.com. "Since they filed, this period of negotiation and time to do your brief for an arbitration hearing has mostly been about discussions on a longer-term deal.

"We talked Thursday, we talked Friday, we're going to talk again (Monday)."

Holland said both sides have "basically agreed on what the one-year award looks like" in the event they don't agree on a longer contract.

DeKeyser is coming off a two-year, $4.375-million deal and an eight-goal, 20-point season.

The Red Wings are also trying to finalize a contract with goaltender Petr Mrazek, but things don't appear to be going as smoothly as they are with DeKeyser. The team elected to go to arbitration with Mrazek asking for one year more than the Red Wings' proposed one-year contract and negotiations are ongoing.

"We've had lots of discussions," Holland said. "There's way more comparables, I think, in Dan DeKeyser's case so it was easier to figure out what was the marketplace. That's certainly not the case of Petr Mrazek's situation.

"So we've had lots of conversations about them explaining their position and (us) explaining our position."

In Mrazek's case, both sides will have two days to negotiate a deal before their scheduled hearing Wednesday. The 24-year-old is coming off a career year that saw him post 27 wins, a .921 save percentage, and a 2.33 goals-against average in 54 games.