Was the Brian Elliott Extension a Good Idea?

Earlier today, the Blues decided to re-sign goaltender Brian Elliott to a 2-year extension worth $3.6 million in the midst of his first All-Star campaign. On the surface, this doesn't seem like a terrible move for St. Louis. After all, should Elliott keep form through the end of the season, another team would probably have to pay more than $3.6 million for his services. The biggest problem with this, however, is that Elliott's current form differs quite a bit from what we've seen over his career (numbers via NHL.com):

Season	Team	GP	ES SA	ES GA	ES SV%
2007-2008	OTT	1	22	1	0.955
2008-2009	OTT	31	628	50	0.920
2009-2010	OTT	55	1089	101	0.907
2010-2011	OTT/COL	55	1237	124	0.900
2011-2012	STL	22	459	25	0.946
Career	3 Teams	164	3435	301	0.912

We've seen teams give out similar contracts based on similar samples, contracts which don't always turn out so well in the department of expected performance (See: Leighton, Michael). At the end of the day, however, a $1.8 million cap hit isn't going to handcuff a team beyond repair. If Elliott turns out to be at least average or a little better, St. Louis will have him locked in at a very good price. If a 22 game sample indeed regresses back to his career averages, the modest average annual value will make this an easy contract to trade or demote, a win-win for the Blues.

Can Rinne Earn All That Money?

The Pekka Rinne contract extension a couple weeks back remains the most interesting off-ice move of the season. It touches on a lot of things we have written about and discussed behind the scenes, most notably the role of luck and skill in results and whether it's better to build a team by spending big on goaltending or leave that money for the skaters - see Matt's thought-provoking post on the subject. The Predators are also in a peculiar spot as a team that has spent near the floor in the past but now will perhaps change gears and spend closer to the cap. This is all happening, and almost certainly related to, with Weber (RFA) and Suter (UFA) coming up as free agents this next offseason. Chase covered the cap/budget impact quite well last week. There is a lot to unpack here and we'll be revisiting this deal, looking at Nashville's situation and trying to answer more general questions like how much top goaltenders should be paid over the course of the season.

In this article, I will look at how his contract compares to those of other top goaltenders, at least those paid like one. The question at hand is how much he has to contribute for his $7M a year to be reasonable compared to other big-money goaltender deals. I am ignoring several key things like regression to the mean that might impact the overall value of goalies. In other words, I'm not looking at more general things like whether goaltenders as a whole are overpaid, or even if Rinne will be but rather what he has to do for us to say he's not overpaid relative to other top-dollar goaltenders.

Everywhere Is WAR

The nice thing about analyzing goalies is that we have a large number of discrete events and while there are teammate, opponent and rink/scorekeeper effects, the strength of a goaltender's performance pretty much boils down to how well they stopped the puck in different situations. Goaltender analysis is more similar to hitters in baseball than it is to skaters in hockey. The metric I'll use is WAR, Wins Above Replacement, which is very similar to the baseball stat of the same name. The idea is to look at how many goals the goalie in question gave up and compare that to what a typical replacement-level goalie (think free agent paid the minimum salary) would have allowed on the same number and type (ES, PK, PP) of shots. We can translate this number into wins to see how many wins each goaltender gave their team over what a replacement-level goalie would have.

I'm far from the first to use this method. As far as I understand it, GVT follows a similar approach for goalies. For a few other examples, Gabe Desjardins did something very similar two years ago over at Puck Prospectus and there was a fanpost on the subject by DoctorMyBrainHurts at Gabe's usual home, Arctic Ice Hockey. Philadelphia's goalie issues and the signing of Bryzgalov motivated some similar work by our friends Kent Wilson and Geoff Detweiler. With skaters it's rather more complicated, but for goalie analysis this approach is pretty clearly the way to go.

This is already one of the longest intros of all time so I won't go too far into detail about exactly how I calculated this. For replacement level, I took took the combined results of goalies that were not in the top 60 in games started for each season after the lockout. Another difference between my work and the others linked above is that I use 5.52 goals per win instead of the usual 6.0, which I feel is more accurate based on regressing league points on non-empty-net goal differential since the lockout. This warrants an article of its own, which I'll post later this week.

What does $4+ million buy these days?

Capgeek only goes back a couple years and nhlnumbers, which I used, only stretches back to 2007-2008. In those four seasons, we have a sample of 60 in which a goaltender had an annualized cap hit of $4M or greater. Here is a scatter plot showing the relationship between goaltender wins-above-replcement and the cap hit minus the minimum player salary. Something to note is that there isn't a very strong relationship between a goaltender's cap hit and how much value in wins he turned out to provide to his team. This is a sign that maybe high-price goaltenders as a group are overpaid, but I'll leave that for future work as it's outside the scope of this article.


The regression equation you see tells us what we should expect a goaltender to produce for a given cap hit over the minimum salary. The last two seasons the minimum has been half a million dollars. Going by that, here is what we should expect out of goaltenders in this range:

Cap Hit ($M)	WAR
4	3.42
4.5	4.28
5	5.14
5.5	6
6	6.86
6.5	7.71
7	8.57

So 4 million dollars buys you about three and a half wins.

How productive must Rinne be?

And finally we are ready to answer the question at hand. How well does Rinne need to play for his contract to compare well to other high-dollar goalie contracts? Looking at the last row of the table, we see that producing a WAR of about 8.57 a year is about right. Here are his last 3 seasons, which comprise 167 of his 168 career starts:

Season	Starts	WAR
2009	49	4.75
2010	54	3.76
2011	64	11.17

This averages out to a WAR of 6.56 per season, far below the expected 8.57. However, there might be two reasons to be optimistic. His number of starts per year has gone up each season and even on a per-start basis his WAR was substantially higher last year than the first two. While our gut instinct may chalk the latter up to random variance, the starts going up each year is obviously important since it's hard to provide value from the bench or IR. This raises two issues, how much he needs to play to get his WAR up to the 8.57 range and/or how much his save percentage might need to improve to do so. Let's consider those separately.

Rinne has faced an average of 24.35 shots at even strength, 4.32 shots on the PK and 0.67 shots with the Preds up a man per start in his career up to the current season. Based on his career save percentages in these spots (0.928/0.877/0.903) and the replacement group's (0.907/0.845/0.908) he has a WAR of 0.118 per start. To get to 8.57 for the season, he would have to start about 72 games a year! Keep in mind that this would be starting almost every game without seeing any dropoff in save percentage from his career average. Only Lundqvist has gotten close to that many starts and based on what Rinne has done the last three years I think we can all agree that this isn't realistic.

So, then, it would appear that he has to improve on his already high save percentage that most of us would guess is over expectation. How much improvement? Let's take his 64 starts last year as the jumping-off point. If he faces the same number and type of shots per start as he has in his career thus far that would be about 1,877 shots a season. A replacement-level goaltender would allow almost exactly 3 goals per start, or 192 goals for the season. At 5.52 goals per win, Rinne would need to concede about 47 fewer goals to be worth 8.57 wins above replacement. This translates to a save percentage of 0.923. Here is a table with all goaltenders with a career save percentage of 0.923 or above, minimum of 500 games played:

Player	Starts	Career Save %

Just off the list is Dominik Hasek with a career save percentage of 0.922.

For his contract to be about about equal in value to other goaltenders making $4M a year or above, all Rinne has to do is play at the Hasek level for 65+ games a year for 7 years.

A Look at the Pekka Rinne Extension

This past Thursday, the Nashville Predators announced they had signed franchise goaltender Pekka Rinne to a 7-year, $49 million extension – the largest deal awarded in team history. After this season, Rinne’s average annual salary of $7 million will represent the highest cap hit for a goalie in the NHL, up from his $3.4 million number this season. On the surface, locking up a player that the franchise sees as “the best goaltender in the NHL” for the foreseeable future may seem wise, but there are a few underlying reasons that make this deal foolish for the Preds.

Let’s think about this again: 7 years, $49 million. For a team that is only spending $49,588,730 towards the cap this season and spent $50,903,696 last season, Rinne’s new $7 million cap figure would represent roughly 1/7 of Nashville’s entire budget. What is more, this doesn’t take into account the inevitable contract situations of both Shea Weber and Ryan Suter.

Weber, of course, was awarded a $7.5 million salary in arbitration this past summer and is entering his final season of restricted free agency. He will once again be arbitration-eligible and shouldn’t command a salary less than $7 million. Without signing him to a long-term deal making his cap hit more favorable, Nashville would likely be committing $14+ million to two players next season. Even if they choose to extend Weber long-term, I don’t see him taking much less than his current salary, further guaranteeing an emerging cap constraint.

Suter’s situation is equally sticky. He is set to become an unrestricted free agent next summer, the clear prize of the defensive UFA class. Considering there hasn’t been a defenseman of Suter’s caliber on the open market in quite awhile, he could easily command a salary upwards of $6 million for multiple seasons. Once again, if the Predators plan to keep Suter they will have to back themselves into a corner salary-wise.

Even worse, all of this hasn’t taken into account Nashville’s dire need for forward depth. If the Predators continue their trend of spending ~$50M relative to the cap, any combination of Rinne-Weber/Suter will easily cost $12-14 million and approach $20 million should they decide to keep all three. Here’s where it gets dicey – the Predators are already on the hook for 11 contracts next season (including Rinne) for a total of $30,710,833. Should they keep one of Weber/Suter, they will be at roughly $36-38 million with 12 players signed. Should they keep them both, they will be approaching $43-45 million with 13 on the roster.

This is where the rubber meets the road. If they choose to spend to the upper limit, the Predators would have roughly $2.8 million per opening to fill out a 20-man roster. If that number seems high, it probably is. It’s very rare for teams to field only 20 players on an active roster for lack-of-depth reasons. No team will go through an entire season with the same 20 players intact, and for each additional skater they chose to ice the Predators would lose about $358,735 per available roster spot. Also, for every $1 million below $64.3 million ownership chooses to spend, that $2.8 million number would drop another $142,857. I’m skeptical that the Predators are ready to step into the arena with the NHL’s heavy spenders just yet, meaning they could easily be looking at $1.6 million (or less) per salary opening just to ice a 21-man roster.

Previewing next year’s offseason, Nashville currently has 8 players not named Shea Weber set to become restricted free agents at the end of this season – seven skaters (4 forwards, 3 defenseman) and G Anders Lindback. Their current salaries total $9,004,167 which wouldn’t take into account any potential raises each player would earn. It is very unlikely Nashville will find the cap space to even address their RFA needs, let alone address their weakness up front in the UFA market. For a team that claims to be solidifying its future, the idea begins to look counterintuitive.

What, then, is the answer to the equation if both Weber and Suter can't fit under Nashville's cap? The difference between Weber's upcoming RFA status and Suter's UFA status may be the deciding factor here. If another GM wants to shoot Nashville an offer sheet for Weber this offseason, they would stand to lose at least two first round draft picks because of the high salary Weber would command. As we saw this past summer, GMs are very reluctant to offer sheet high-priced RFAs for this exact reason, thus giving Weber more certainty to be back next year. Should the Predators find themselves out of contention by the trading deadline, shopping Ryan Suter could fetch a ton of offers for a playoff run because of his affordable $3.5 million cap hit. While a trade may be the best option moving forward, if Nashville is in the playoff picture it seems less likely any deal would happen. Should Suter decide to test the UFA waters come July, the Preds may lose out on receiving compensation for his departure. If it became clear that he wasn't going to re-sign, they could trade his negotiating rights before July 1 but any return would be less than what they could get at the deadline.

Regardless of what happens to both defenseman this summer, there is no way around the fact that having Weber and Suter on the ice is a heavy positive for the Predators. While Nashville ownership claims to be making every effort to re-sign them both, having the Rinne contract on the books will make it extremely difficult. At the end of the day, $7 million is an astronomical salary for a goaltender, especially for a team on an internal budget. Without taking nearly all of that salary and pouring it into better options up front, it may be awhile before we see Nashville capable of producing a positive shot differential per 60 minutes at even strength. In the end, it was GOB who said it best:


Next up will be JaredL delivering your statistics fix by taking taking a deeper look into the actual values of Rinne and other goaltenders to their teams.

A Contract I Actually Like: Martin Hanzal

Two days before the Phoenix Coyotes were set to open the 2011-2012 regular season, they announced the signing of Martin Hanzal to a brand-new 5 year, $15.5 million contract extension. Though it wasn’t earth-shattering news and most likely ignored by the majority of NHL fans, there are a few things that stand out making this deal very good for the Coyotes.

1. Term

Hanzal was scheduled to become a restricted free agent after this season. Under the current terms of the CBA, he would have been eligible for unrestricted free agency status after the 2013-14 season, his 7th in the league. Rather than risk the (slim) possibility of another GM firing an offer sheet his way, Phoenix was able to buy the rest of his RFA eligibility and an additional three seasons of UFA status.

2. Salary

Hanzal’s extension will earn him an average annual salary of $3.1 million, his number against the cap. Because he was set to become a restricted free agent, Phoenix had the luxury of exclusive control over Hanzal and did a good job not to overpay for his services. Regardless of how the cap is drawn up in the next CBA, Hanzal's cap hit will not tie up a significant portion of Phoenix's money, always a plus for teams operating with an internal budget.

3. On-Ice Production

Speaking of said services, let’s take a look at exactly what Hanzal brings to the table. Per NHL.com, here are Hanzal's ice time numbers from his first four seasons:

Year	Age	GP	ES TOI/Game	PP TOI/Game	PK TOI/Game	TOT TOI/Game
07-08	20	72	12:49	2:43	1:11	16:44
08-09	21	74	12:48	0:48	2:44	16:21
09-10	22	81	14:16	2:05	2:06	18:28
10-11	23	61	14:22	3:00	2:07	19:30

As we can see, Hanzal is playing in every possible situation for Phoenix, the very definition of versatility. What is more, Hanzal entered the league garnering top-6 minutes and steadily increased his ice time to become the team's leader last season. How has Hanzal handled these assignments? Upon first glance, his point totals don't seem to be passing the test of a top-6 forward:

Year	Age	GP	ES G (Team Rank)	ES A (Team Rank)	ES Pts (Team Rank)	PP G (Team Rank)	PP A (Team Rank)	PP Pts (Team Rank)
07-08	20	72	6 (7)	16 (5)	22 (6)	1 (9)	11 (3)	12 (T-5)
08-09	21	74	9 (6)	17 (T-4)	26 (T-5)	0 (T-14)	2 (T-8)	2 (T-10)
09-10	22	81	9 (T-8)	18 (5)	27 (T-7)	2 (T-7)	4 (7)	6 (T-7)
10-11	23	61	9 (T-7)	10 (10)	19 (T-9)	7 (3)	0 (T-11)	7 (4)

However, Hanzal is yet another case where applying proper context is vital to determine his value. If we take a look at some key numbers thanks to Behind The Net, Time on Ice and Eric T., we find an entirely different story:

Year	Age	GP	CorsiRelQoC (League Rank - Min 20 GP)	Balanced Corsi	Balanced Corsi Rel	Zone Start %	Zone Finish %	Corsi/60	ZS Adjusted Corsi	Score-Tied Fenwick %
07-08	20	72	0.873 (37)	4.56	4.66	47.1	49.1	-1.52	-0.998	52.8
08-09	21	74	1.177 (7)	3.29	11.29	38.4	45.5	-5.76	-3.672	45.5
09-10	22	81	1.006 (11)	7.61	3.07	46.6	50.9	4.9	5.512	54.3
10-11	23	61	0.837 (21)	9.2	8.3	46.5	49.1	7.1	7.73	52.8

During his rookie year, Hanzal was thrown to the wolves at even strength, facing the 37th toughest CorsiRelQoC score in the entire league. He hasn't slowed down since, routinely showing up on the list of players who face the league's elite night-in and night-out. His Balanced Corsi scores show that he is performing well above his expectation pushing the play forward in these situations, handling extremely tough assignments with relative ease. Though his Power Play stats have been less than impressive, Phoenix has never ranked above 19th in SF/60 on the PP during Hanzal's time in the desert. Regardless, his excellent play at even strength means that Phoenix will have a young and versatile tough-minutes forward locked up no matter where the franchise finds itself at the expiration of the contract.