The State Of Contracts In The NHL Today, Part 1

It's been ripping good fun watching teams ink their best players for periods of time that I hadn't even considered possible. By the time Ilya Kovalchuk's contract ends, people will be riding on Hoverboards, but not for leisure, as they will be using them in the fight against the deadly invasion of space aliens. Remember that you read this on Driving Play first; perhaps that will be your last thought as you enter the terrible tentacled maw of an interstellar conqueror.

I seem to have gotten off track here, but it's going to be fascinating watching teams maneuver with these contracts on board over the next 5-8 years. Some of them are time bombs, waiting to explode in a team's face. We can't say which. Others will provide the foundation for a Stanley Cup championship. And while I expect this trend to be reversed under the next CBA - even as many teams have one of these contracts on their books, they no doubt realize the enormous advantage conveyed upon teams that have multiple ultra-long-term contracts, and are going to work to remove the possibility of such a contract under the next CBA - the cat is out of the bag. Let's look at when these big contracts end.

2018: 9
2019: 4
2020: 6
2021: 5
2022: 2
2023: 1
2024: 0
2025: 1
That's a total of 28 contracts that end more than 6 years from now, and that number will no doubt increase when Ryan Suter, Zach Parise, and Shea Weber are re-signed this offseason, among others. 17 NHL teams have a contract that ends in 2018 or later.

Most of these contracts are at 'discount prices.' For instance, Marian Hossa and Ilya Kovalchuk are signed to deals that have a 5.2M and 6.6M cap hit, respectively, and that end roughly when your life's course will be fully determined and there's no extricating yourself from your fate. Their cap hits on contracts both signed after the end of the lockout, when the salary cap was 39M? 6M and 6.3M, respectively. Their cap hits have barely moved even as the salary cap itself has nearly doubled, and this was for players who were RFA when they signed their post-lockout deals, and UFA when they signed their lifetime contracts.

I decided to look at the top 20 largest cap hits in the league in 2008-09 and the biggest cap hits in the league in 2011-12. The summer of 2008 was when teams seemingly decided that the cap would never go anything but outrageously upwards - the economy was robust, NHL fans had forgotten about the lockout, and Glen Sather knew that the surge of Wade Redden jersey purchases would pay for that contract by themselves.

Year	Total Top 20 Salary	Salary Cap	% Of Total Cap Space
2008-09	$148.248M	$56.7M	8.72%
2011-12	$151.047M	$64.3M	7.83%

The 'Total Top 20 Salary' column refers to the summed amount of the top 20 biggest cap hits in the league. As we can see, it's barely moved despite the fact that the cap has grown by more than $7M. The '% Of Total Cap Space' refers to the top 20 salaries' total being divided by the salary cap amount times 30, for the 30 teams in the NHL. We can see that the percentage has gone down by nearly a full percent. That doesn't sound like very much, but we're talking about nearly 1% of 1.7 billion dollars. That means that cap-hit wise, the top 20 contracts are down by nearly an average of $766K relative to the cap. In total dollars, as we can see, things have remained relatively stagnant.

The deals that are super-long term don't really fit into this mold either, as only 5 contracts in the current top 20 biggest cap hits end in 2018 or after. That means these players whose big contracts end earlier will almost certainly face pressure to sign for a lower cap hit - odds are they will be out of their prime when their current deal ends.

In Part 2, I will examine RFA forwards to see if this trend also holds true among lower paid players, and in Part 3, I will give some reasons why the NHL is evolving in this way.

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 Thought Experiment about Goaltending, Fenwick, and Lineup Construction

Before I go any further, I must note that this piece is an introduction, and to be honest, I don't quite know exactly where it will go.  I do know that I'd like you, the readers, to give any input in the comments, as this topic will certainly be revisited in the future.

One of my favorite elements of NHL analysis is looking at line-up construction in the context of the salary cap.  My favorite team, the Blackhawks, are like a number of other teams in that they will almost always spend to the externally imposed cap, but frankly, this analysis can extend to every team in the league, as they will almost always be working with internally imposed constraints.  

The question is simple: What is the best way to put together a line-up that can consistently compete to win a championship?

Here is where Fenwick and Goaltending come into play, to illustrate my point, I ask these questions below:

What is the lower bound of goalie performance for a team with legitimate Stanley Cup aspirations?  Is it saving 87% of shots? 88%? 89%?

What about Fenwick (puck possession)? Is it 44%? 46%? 48%?

Spending big money on a goaltender likely comes at the expense of signing better skaters.  What is the optimal solution? Is it the team that has a goalie saving 90.5% of Even Strength shots but has a Fenwick of 55% more likely to win a Cup than the team that has a goalie saving 93% of Even Strength shots but gets crushed territorially, only managing to Fenwick 46%?

While we can safely assume that there is a correlation between salary and ability in goaltenders, we cannot escape the reality that dollars are fixed, and money spent on goaltenders cannot be spent on skaters.  This makes it difficult for teams that spend large chunks of salary on goalies to build teams that dominate at even strength. There are exceptions to this to the first rule, both in terms of mediocre goalies making big money (Cam Ward), elite goalies making back-up money (Tomas Vokoun, though this is only one year), and in terms of teams who have managed to build a team with excellent goaltending and excellent puck possession (Montreal and Vancouver come to mind), but by and large, teams that spend big money on their goaltenders put themselves at a competitive disadvantage when it comes to competing for a Stanley Cup.

My position is that goaltending, like rebounding in basketball, doesn't matter until it matters.  That is to say it is not as important as say, winning at even strength.  I recognize that this is a controversial position, and I hope that this opens up some discussion.  I will come back to this with more data throughout the season, but right now I want to limit this to a philosophical discussion.

Boston showed us last year that a team can be mediocre 5v5 and still win a cup, so long as the goaltending is on point, but there are few who peg them as favorites to repeat, which is pretty telling when we consider that most of their team will return.  People generally recognize, whether it is conscious or not, that relying so heavily on your netminder is not a recipe for success over multi-year timeframes.

Winning at even strength is important, but are we in the statistics world overrating its importance?  Is it as important as having a world-beater between the pipes?  How does a rising cap change this picture?

Let us know your thoughts, we believe this is a pretty interesting topic.

A Look at the Shea Weber Arbitration Deal

We teamed up on this article. Chase wrote the first part and JaredL wrote the end, starting at "The Good News and Bad News for Nashville".

When Shea Weber was awarded a 1-year, $7.5 million contract in salary arbitration this past Wednesday, it left me wondering whether or not the Predators’ superstar defenseman was deserving of such a high salary. After all, $7.5 million ties him for the 7th highest cap hit in the league for 2011-2012 and is #1 amongst his fellow blueliners. What is it that Weber continually brings to the table for Nashville? Per nhl.com, let’s take a look at his ice time in all situations last year:

Player	Games Played	ES TOI/Game	Team Rank	PP TOI/Game	Team Rank	SH TOI/Game	Team Rank	Total TOI/Game	Team Rank
Weber	82	19:33	2	3:38	1	2:06	3	25:19	1

As we can see, Nashville relies heavily upon Weber in all situations. Ranking number one among defensemen teammates in total ice time per game, Weber allows coach Barry Trotz to lean on him no matter the pinch that the team may find themselves in.

In an attempt to bestow some context upon these minutes, I wandered over to Behind the Net and ran a query for the CorsiRelQoC score of all NHL defenseman with a minimum of 20 games played last season. The results are below:

RK	NAME	TEAM	Corsi Rel QoC
1	NICKLASLIDSTROM	DET	1.807
2	MARCSTAAL	NYR	1.602
3	DANGIRARDI	NYR	1.583
4	BRADSTUART	DET	1.501
5	NICKLASGROSSMAN	DAL	1.468
6	ROBYNREGEHR	CGY	1.452
7	STEPHANEROBIDAS	DAL	1.422
8	JASONGARRISON	FLA	1.412
9	MIKEWEAVER	FLA	1.381
10	JAYBOUWMEESTER	CGY	1.307
11	WILLIEMITCHELL	L.A	1.3
12	MATTIASOHLUND	T.B	1.275
13	TONILYDMAN	ANA	1.239
14	BARRETJACKMAN	STL	1.12
15	KEITHAULIE	TOR	1.119
16	KARLALZNER	WSH	1.106
17	JOHNCARLSON	WSH	1.088
18	SAMISALO	VAN	1.071
19	ZDENOCHARA	BOS	1.047
20	KIMMOTIMONEN	PHI	1.024
21	BROOKSORPIK	PIT	0.996
22	RYANSUTER	NSH	0.971
23	SHEAWEBER	NSH	0.942
24	BRENTSEABROOK	CHI	0.928
25	JOHNNYBOYCHUK	BOS	0.927
26	LUBOMIRVISNOVSKY	ANA	0.907
27	RYANO'BYRNE	COL	0.888
28	DEREKMORRIS	PHX	0.883
29	BRAYDONCOBURN	PHI	0.88
30	CHRISPHILLIPS	OTT	0.847

Weber sits 23rd, perhaps unsurprisingly attached at the hip to his frequent defensive partner Ryan Suter. Browsing some of the names on this list, we can see that Weber is in elite league-wide company with the toughness of his minutes. Putting Weber’s score in a team context, here is the CorsiRelQoC of all Nashville skaters with the same games played requirement:

RK	NAME	TEAM	Corsi Rel QoC
1	JOELWARD	NSH	1.126
2	RYANSUTER	NSH	0.971
3	MARTINERAT	NSH	0.961
4	SHEAWEBER	NSH	0.942
5	JERREDSMITHSON	NSH	0.83
6	DAVIDLEGWAND	NSH	0.805
7	NICKSPALING	NSH	0.633
8	KEVINKLEIN	NSH	0.621
9	MIKEFISHER	NSH	0.564
10	JONATHONBLUM	NSH	0.522
11	MATTHALISCHUK	NSH	0.51
12	SERGEIKOSTITSYN	NSH	0.436
13	JORDINTOOTOO	NSH	0.306
14	FRANCISBOUILLON	NSH	0.177
15	STEVESULLIVAN	NSH	0.055
16	MARCELGOC	NSH	0.01
17	CALO'REILLY	NSH	-0.02
18	PATRICHORNQVIST	NSH	-0.02
19	COLINWILSON	NSH	-0.035
20	SHANEO'BRIEN	NSH	-0.247
21	JPDUMONT	NSH	-0.487
22	CODYFRANSON	NSH	-0.673
23	BLAKEGEOFFRION	NSH	-1.217

We see just how important Weber is to his team. He and Suter face competition in the conversation with the league’s elite, and Nashville would certainly struggle to replace his minutes if they were to lose his services. With tough-minutes eater Joel Ward leaving for Washington in the offseason, it will only make Weber all the more important to Nashville’s success in 2011-2012. Having noted the context of Weber’s minutes, just how well is he doing with his given role?

	ES Goals	ES Assists	ES Points	PP Goals	PP Assists	PP Points
Stat	9	21	30	6	11	17
Team Rank	1	1	1	1	2	T-1
NHL Rank	T-3	T-11	7	T-9	T-29	T-23

Corsi ON	CorsiRel	Fenwick %	CorsiRelQoC	Zone Start %	Zone Finish %
2.69	7.2	53.4	0.942	45.3	48.4

The table should be fairly self-explanatory: Weber is the best offensive producer amongst the defenseman on his team and ranks in the top-30 league-wide in every category. What is more, despite a 45% zone start and a hefty CorsiRelQoC number, the majority of the shots while he is on the ice are being directed at the opponent’s net. Weber is certainly handling his minutes in the manner of an elite NHL defenseman, and without him Nashville would be in a pinch for tough-minutes help in all situations and production from their back-end. On one hand, the numbers don’t indicate that he’s the best defenseman in the league, though he appears to be among them, so it seems the ruling overpays him. On the other it doesn’t seem like the contract will keep Nashville from signing anyone given their cap situation and the timing. Perhaps they are less likely to make a trade that takes on more salary for this season due to an internal cap. I would have to conclude that Shea Weber’s new 1-year contract is a win-win for all parties involved. What he signs next year will be more interesting.

The Good News and Bad News for Nashville

How important is Weber to the Predators? This question doesn't quite equate to value but is certainly a big part of how their fans and front office will view the extension. To speculate, it seems likely that Nashville GM David Poile chose arbitration because he thinks Shea Weber is very important to the Predators - he didn't want to risk losing him due to another team tabling an unmatchable offer sheet, despite compensation the Preds would get if that happened.

On that front, there is good news and potentially some bad news for Nashville. I'll start with the good news. Using play-by-play data from the last two seasons, WOWY stats indicate that the Predators were far better off with Weber on the ice in every situation. Let's break this down.

Here are the overall even-strength numbers with both goalies in net:

ES	Corsi	Minutes	Corsi/60	Corsi QoC
Weber On	+204	2,965.4	4.128	1.155
Weber Off	-153	5,112.7	-1.796	0.425

Weber is facing tough competition and Nashville does far better with him on; their Corsi rate goes up by 5.92 shots per 60 when he jumps onto the ice. Let's go ahead and break this down further. What about when facing tough or weak competition? To look at that, we've broken down the ice time into situations where the average Corsi of the opposing players, according to BTN, is positive and those where it is negative. Here is the breakdown:

ES	Corsi	Minutes	Corsi/60	Corsi QoC
Tough, Weber On	-136	1,714.2	-4.760	6.037
Tough, Weber Off	-440	2,689.4	-9.816	5.794
Easy, Weber On	+340	1,251.2	16.304	-5.533
Easy, Weber Off	+287	2,423.3	7.106	-5.533

Looking at the overall picture, Weber has had success despite having a really high qualcomp. While he is obviously doing well against the above-average players, to the tune of increasing his team's Corsi rate by 5.1 per 60, a much larger WOWY difference comes against weaker competition - his presence on the ice increased Nashville's Corsi against below average players by 9.2 per. Given his offensive skills, this is perhaps not too surprising.

Now let's move on to zone starts. Using faceoff information, we can look only at times where there was a faceoff in the offensive/defensive zone within the last minute. That should serve as a pretty good indicator of how good he is in each zone. We also include all situations where either the most recent faceoff was more than a minute before or was in the neutral zone.

Off Zone	Corsi	Minutes	Corsi/60	Corsi QoC
Weber On	+295	539.9	32.782	1.283
Weber Off	+406	945.5	25.765	0.357

Def Zone	Corsi	Minutes	Corsi/60	Corsi QoC
Weber On	-219	665.6	-19.741	1.574
Weber Off	-494	1,014.0	-29.230	0.782

Neutral	Corsi	Minutes	Corsi/60	Corsi QoC
Weber On	+62	922.7	4.032	1.283
Weber Off	-84	1,513.6	-3.330	0.429

Again, we see the same pattern with Nashville having much more success with Weber on the ice in all three zones. Somewhat surprisingly, the biggest difference is in the defensive zone.

Now let's look at special teams. Here are the PP numbers, first Corsi then goals, with shorthanded goals conceded subtracted:

Power Play	Corsi	Minutes	Corsi/60
Weber On	+823	567.1	87.082
Weber Off	+439	341.8	77.074

Power Play	Goals	Minutes	Goals/60
Weber On	63	567.1	6.666
Weber Off	19	341.8	3.336

Here are the penalty-kill numbers:

Penalty Kill	Corsi	Minutes	Corsi/60
Weber On	-333	267.2	-74.785
Weber Off	-794	581.3	-81.957

Penalty Kill	Goals	Minutes	Goals/60
Weber On	-28	267.2	-6.288
Weber Off	-64	581.3	-6.606

There are a couple things worth noting here. A guy has to rest sometime, but these numbers indicate that Weber is an above-average penalty killer for the Preds and should probably get more time. The previous set of charts indicating that he was good in the defensive end is further evidence. On that note, it's interesting that there was a larger difference in his defensive-zone WOWY than for the offensive zone, but that was flipped for special teams. This is pretty likely just due to random variance. You shouldn't put too much stock into the exact numbers, but note the very strong pattern that has emerged. In every situation, Nashville was better with Weber on the ice than off it, in most cases substantially. This despite him facing tougher competition than the average Predator in all 5-on-5 scenarios and most likely on the power play.

Potential "Bad" News: Is Suter Actually Driving Play?
I put bad in quotation marks because it's not really bad news for Nashville, except that it would indicate seriously overpaying for Weber no matter how you look at it. I say potential because evidence is scarce. The reason for this is that Shea Weber and Ryan Suter have spent almost all of their ice time together over the last three years. That makes it very difficult to separate. Going back four seasons, Suter had better numbers but he also had a much better partner. Weber spent most of his time alongside Greg Zanon while Suter was paired with Marek Zidlicky.

While the sample sizes reduce this from a blow-your-mind revelation to an anecdote worth considering, you may be surprised to learn that when they've been apart Suter has had more success, or perhaps less failure would be a better way to put it. He's also faced tougher competition. Here's a chart going over their time together and apart in the last two years.

Even Strength	Corsi	Minutes	Corsi/60	Corsi QoC
Both On	+228	2,487.7	5.499	1.068
Weber Only	-24	477.7	-3.015	1.605
Suter Only	-1	368.5	-0.163	2.110
Neither	-152	4,744.2	-1.922	0.295

Overall it is certain that at the very least the Weber-Suter pairing is very important to the Predators' success. In every situation, Weber's presence on the ice improved his team's numbers. This is muddied by Suter's stats looking very similar, for obvious reasons, and actually being better against tougher competition in the rare cases when they were apart. Given that they are both free agents next summer, it's going to be very important to figure out if they are both carrying the water or if only one is.

We'd love to hear from Nashville fans. Which of the two do you think is Driving Play? What do you think Weber should get if he re-signs long term?