On the Chris Kunitz Extension

Since there is no time like two weeks after it was signed, let's take a look at the Chris Kunitz contract extension.

The Terms

Kunitz's current cap hit of $3.75M was extended for another 2 years with salary to match. There are a couple things to note about this. For one, it was signed at the start of the season, a practice Triumph discussed in a recent post. From the Pens' perspective, this opens them up to risk in case Kunitz gets an injury or is otherwise drastically less productive this year than he has been in recent years. I don't think this is quite as bad for the Penguins as other teams since they should be willing to spend over the cap by burying his contract if necessary. On the positive side of things, Shero doesn't risk Kunitz testing the free-agent market which could drive his price up.

Kunitz's age is a factor here. At 32 it seems likely that his skills will start to decline. Based on that, it may be surprising that he's not taking a salary cut but you have to remember the salary cap. The first season of his current deal, 2008-2009, the salary cap was $56.7 million. It is currently at $64.3M so his cap hit is down from 6.6% of the salary cap to 5.8%. Putting it in 2009 cap-hit dollars would make his salary $3.3 million, so it is a small drop.

Pittsburgh's Cap Situation

The Penguins are a unique team due to having Crosby, Malkin and to some extent Staal down the middle. I'll discuss the player-evaluation side of that later, but there are major salary-cap implications as well. Next offseason looks pretty standard as far as the cap goes, but bombs are about to fall on the Pens' cap situation. Here are the major players hitting unrestricted free agency, their current cap hit and the summer they become free agents.

Player	Cap Hit $M	Year
Sidney Crosby	8.7	2013
Jordan Staal	4	2013
Evgeni Malkin	8.7	2014
Kris Letang	3.5	2014
Brooks Orpik	3.75	2014
Chris Kunitz	3.75	2014

Orpik seems like the odd man out there, but the rest of that group figures to get a raise and to be honest it's hard to see Shero being able to keep all of them together. In any case, cap space will be at a premium those seasons and Kunitz's contract runs out the summer after Crosby and Staal would need to be re-signed.

Even-Strength Production

The traditional fans would discuss his leadership and Cup experience helping tremendously in the 2009 Cup run. As important as that may have been, I prefer to look at measurable contributions.

Due especially to Crosby, one needs to take a with-or-without-you (WOWY) approach to analyze the production of wingers for the Penguins. Kunitz is a good example of that; he has spent more than half his time in Pittsburgh on Crosby's wing. Here is a table of the Corsi rate for Crosby, Malkin, Staal and none of those with and without Kunitz, as well as the time in minutes that Kunitz spent with them. I'm excluding time where two of Crosby, Malkin and Staal were on the ice together.

Center	w/ Kunitz	w/out Kunitz	with TOI (m)
Crosby	10.17	4.912	808.3
Malkin	5.093	-5.336	141.4
Staal	16.665	5.867	302.4
None	3.484	2.025	223.9

As you can see, Kunitz improved every line. Crosby's Corsi rate was nearly twice as high when Kunitz was beside him and in smaller samples Malkin and Staal's production was substantially higher with him. I should point out that Malkin's possession numbers without Crosby were drastically better in his shortened 2010-2011 season than previous years and over half of Kunitz's time with Malkin was last year. Kunitz gets some credit for that, but it seems like Malkin was better as well. The fourth line got marginally better results.

It's pretty clear that Kunitz has been a big boost.

Two Potential Concerns: Injuries and Scoring

In the summer, Pensburgh wrote a nice summary of both Kunitz's injuries and scoring with the Penguins. For a left winger, his points totals have been underwhelming due in part to his injuries. According to this guideline at PPP, an average first-line left winger would put in 27 goals. In the last three seasons, Kunitz put up 23, 13 and 23 goals. Going to points, the average for a first line left wing is 50 and Kunitz put up 48, 32 and 53 the last three years. So he's somewhere between an average first-line winger and an average second-line winger when it comes to scoring. A big reason for this is obviously missing significant time the last two years.

Another factor is that Kunitz's individual points percentage is nothing to write home about. He registered a goal or assist on 69.4% of all 5-on-5 goals scored with him on the ice, 7th highest among forwards on the team. This combined with his Corsi numbers make sense given his role - he is important in driving play, helping to move the puck into the offensive zone and keep it there, but Crosby is typically the man with the puck in the attacking end. I don't think his somewhat low scoring for a first-line winger is an issue given his role.

The Verdict

Overall, I think it's a good deal for both sides. Kunitz has been a very good role player the last 2+ seasons for the Penguins. While he is on the wrong side of 30, it seems reasonable to expect a similar level over the life of the contract. Injury concerns and his contract ending the season after Crosby and Staal are due to sign their extensions keep me from saying it is a great deal for the Pens, but even Shero would have to spend some money on wingers.

JaredL's Principles For Evaluating Roster Decisions

Now that the long part of the summer is over, hopefully along with all the horrible news stories, training camps are open and preseason games have started, a lot of the focus goes to roster decisions. This includes who should make the team and who should be shipped back down to the minors, what the best line and defense combinations are, who should play on the power play and penalty kill, which lines should get the offensive starts and who should get the tough minutes. In the style of fellow Driving Play author Triumph, who wrote on evaluating prospects, I humbly present my principles for evaluating the decisions made by the coach and front office of your favorite team.

You'll see that as I go on a lot of these principles will be focused versions or combinations of previous ones. I'm trying to convey not only particular ideas but what I feel is a good overall thought process.

Principle #1: It's Complicated!

Hockey is not an easy sport to analyze. A lot of the things we love about the game make it tough - the game flows instead of being chopped up into individual plays, substitution and coaching adjustments happen on the fly, there are many different styles of play, there are a million different hockey skills and most of them can't be isolated or measured and luck is a big enough factor that in a few minutes or even several games just about anything can happen. Other than a penalty shot, nothing is isolated to just one player so teamwork is very important; players must complement each other and be able to work well together. On top of all this, the players get tired much more quickly than in other sports so that puts more limitations on what a coach can do with his lines.

I'm not saying these things make it impossible to analyze, far from it. We can offer a lot of insight on what coaches and GMs should do. We certainly have and will continue to criticize what we feel are bad decisions and at some point we might even get around to offering praise. These problems are very difficult so we should expect even the brightest hockey minds to make mistakes. Also, the level of complexity could make what we on the outside think is a blunder a smart move for reasons we don't know about.

Principle #2: Keep Tradeoffs in Mind

Perhaps I should have titled this there is only so much ice time to go around. One reason for the complexity I discussed above is that there are tradeoffs all over the place. If your coach goes from rolling lines to focusing on matchups then his guys aren't going to be quite as fresh, or at least their rest time won't be as regular. If you give your top line more starts in the offensive zone then that's fewer Ozone starts for the other lines. Your favorite gritty young player earning a spot on the fourth line means someone else is getting dropped to the minors. Putting your second-best scorer on the same line as your top guy lessens your scoring depth. Separating them means your top line won't be as powerful.

Every single roster decision is riddled with tradeoffs. They are unavoidable. You can't only consider the benefits of making a change but must consider the drawbacks as well. More on how to do that below.

Principle #3: Beware of Unintended Consequences

Principle #2 was about there only being so much ice time to go around. This is the other side of that coin - someone has to take up every kind of ice time. In addition to the tradeoffs I talked about above you have to think up a level. If you give your top guys more Ozone faceoffs not only does that mean that there are fewer of those to go around, but they are also not going to be able to take as many Dzone faceoffs so the rest of the team will have to take more of those. You can't have the Sedin line getting 3 faceoffs in the offensive zone for every 1 they take in their own end without the other lines taking worse starts than average - most of it being Malhotra with the ratio reversed. Kane can't get all those easy minutes without someone else picking up the slack and taking on the toughs - in this case Bolland and Hossa.

Principle #4: Be Reasonable!

Especially with matchups and zone starts, there are limits. With matchups, you have very little control in your away games. Beyond that there is the rest issue plus the opponents are only going to put their worst guys out there for so long. You can't give a line nothing but easy minutes, at least in the regular season. You can't give a line nothing but tough minutes, either. The same goes for zone starts. Sometimes two or even three lines are dead tired and you have to put the fresh one out there no matter where the faceoff is.

There is only so far you can go.

Principle #5: Cater to Sensitive Players

In an earlier draft I had a bunch of econ jargon but it was a Catch-22; it would only be understandable if you were already familiar with the concepts. You didn't, but if you feel like you missed out on something here's a link to the wikipedia page on comparative advantage.

So you realize it's complicated, have kept tradeoffs in mind, are considering unintended consequences and are reasonable. How should you make the case that X should get more Ozone starts, with Y picking up the extra Dzone starts or Z should face the toughs with W getting protected minutes? The answer is that you should pander to the sensitive players. In other words, you want to give the players where zone starts or quality of competition matters the most the easier minutes.

Put differently, whichever group has the largest gap in performance between easy and tough competition or after starts in the offensive zone and defensive zone should get the more sheltered time. I'm big on number crunching, but it's still a better way to think about divvying up the time if you just use the eyeball test and your own intuition. The key is to focus on the relative importance of each situation for the players, not in absolutes.

Principle #6: Context Matters

The last few were mostly about line usage, but when evaluating personnel decisions remember to take context into account. Maybe the fourth liner you think was good for nothing and should get the drop actually did well, fourth-line well at least, but faced tough opposition or spent a lot of time in his own zone. It is especially important to look into context stats for fringe players because their starts and especially Qualcomp numbers can be more extreme due to the small sample sizes. According to BTN, of players with 40 or more games Nicklas Grossman had the highest 5-on-5 Corsi QoC last season facing opponents with an average Corsi rate of 1.742. If we drop the games-played requirement to 10 then there were 8 players that faced tougher competition on average than Mr. Grossman, led by Petr Prucha at 3.259.

Principle #7: This Season Isn't Last Season

A lot changes from season to season. In addition to personnel changes, players age and their offseason workouts or time at the Byfuget table can mean big differences in productivity and style from one year to the next. Be especially cautious projecting young players, old players, players coming off injury, players moving to a new team and, I suppose, players who had their linemates/defensive partner leave town. I made this mistake myself in an offhand comment in this article when I said that we should expect Stamkos's stats to take a hit this season. I'm not completely backing off from that statement, look for a post projecting his goal tally in the near future, but I certainly should have thought about it more.

Conclusion

Using the above principles you will not always reach the right conclusion. Sometimes players perform above expectation. That's true for you, your GM and coach as well as your favorite bloggers. Sometimes what we expected of a player is flat out wrong or for some other reason we make bad judgments. While it doesn't guarantee that you get the right answer, the principles above should help your thought process, improve how you look at these sorts of decisions and make you more likely to get it right.