Ian White is Better Than You Think

Perhaps it's because he's been a bit of journeyman thus far, or the result of signing so cheaply with Detroit two summers ago, but I've been getting the feeling that Ian White isn't as appreciated as he should be in the hockey world. Granted, it's not every day that a player is employed by a club facing the loss of arguably the greatest player to ever play their position. However, without Nicklas Lidstrom this season, Detroit is doing just that. Before we all jump to giddy excitement that the Red Wings could be on the outside of the playoffs looking in, let's take a look at a few of White's advanced metrics:

Year	Team	Ozone% (Team Rank)	Corsi/60 (Team Rank)	CorsiRelQoC (Team Rank)	ATOI
2011-2012	DET	57.7 (3)	13.06 (2)	0.944 (2)	22:59
2010-2011	CGY/CAR/SJS	49.4 (6/3/5)	2.70 (5/1/5)	-0.086 (5/7/6)	19:60
2009-2010	TOR/CGY	57.9 (2/1)	10.37 (2/3)	0.739 (2/2)	22:47
2008-2009	TOR	52.9 (4)	3.92 (3)	0.411 (2)	22:51
2007-2008	TOR	53.5(2)	10.86(1)	0.160 (5)	18:48

In layman's terms, White has been a very good Corsi player throughout his career, even when faced with tougher assignments. Problem is, he's moved around so damn much that it's kind of hard to get a clear picture of exactly where these assignments came from. His 2010-2011 is a mess considering he was traded twice, but he played a majority of that season starting in the defensive zone for non-playoff teams. I don't have the data to see if his competition or zone starts changed much in San Jose, but he still had no problem breaking even apart from many common linemates.

Also, before anyone rushes to point out that Old St. Nick was indeed his most common defensive partner last season, White again had no problem producing good numbers apart from Lidstrom. No matter which way you slice it, White is consistently outperforming other players used similarly, in Detroit or elsewhere.

Averaging .37 PPG and 1.97 SOG/G for his career with a good bit of PP TOI/G last season, the Wings could do a lot worse than moving forward with Ian White.

Note: Team rank separated by where White's numbers stacked up on each team, sans those players he was traded for.

Who This New CBA Sucks For

I'm going to go ahead and assume that you are familiar with the broad strokes of the new CBA, happily reached very early this morning.  I'd like to point out who it sucks for, as I don't see anyone in the mainstream media doing that.

It Sucks For Big Market Teams:  Cheat code contracts are out.  8 year maximum on contracts means teams can no longer load up for a championship run by inking a player to a super-long, risky deal.  The salary cap is returning to where it was in 2011-12.  Players can't be buried in the AHL anymore - they count on the cap past a certain threshold.

It Sucks For Mid-Market Teams:  Mid-market teams who want to spend, profits be damned, are limited by the same rules as the above.  The salary cap is still tied to total revenues, a disproportionate amount come from e.g. the Toronto Maple Leafs.  While the cap is at a 'sane' level now, it may not be there by the end of the agreement, which will limit the parity these teams seek.

It Sucks For Small-Market Teams:  The salary floor in 2012-13 and 2013-14 will be higher than the salary cap was in 2005-06.  No doubt NHL revenues have grown a great deal since then, but besides shares of television contracts, have they really grown that much for teams in weaker markets?  The floor has effectively doubled since the beginning and may end up tripling - have revenues done so for these clubs, and will revenue sharing cover that eventual trebling?

It Sucks For Superstars:  No more contracts with huge amounts of front-loaded dollars.  No more contracts where you as a player both get A: financial security for the rest of your career B: more money than if you signed a 'legitimate' contract and C: cost less money on the salary cap than you otherwise would, thus helping your team get better.

It Sucks For Mid-Range Players:  Without superstars getting those huge front-loaded contracts, mid-range players will have to settle for less of the pie, generally.  Big market teams also have no ability to bury contracts anymore, so I expect fewer deals of 5 and 6 years being given out to average-ish players.

It Sucks for Fringe Players:  Fringe players gave up half a year, and while the minimum salary will increase by 50% over the course of the agreement, fringe-type players are unlikely to see what they lost in this agreement come back to them.

We don't have the full agreement yet.  And no doubt I'm taking a pessimistic view partly for rhetorical reasons.  Still, everyone gave something up here, and it's unclear what exactly they gained besides the ability to conduct business again.

A Problem With A Shortened Season

We're hearing a lot of talk that a 48 game season is the lowest the NHL will go - any lower than that and the season should be canceled, according to the NHL, because it will be a hollow contest. Tyler Dellow wrote an interesting post about why this sounds like malarkey, bunkum, or whatever other olde tyme noun you want to apply to the nonsense which Gary Bettman and his cadre of non-fanatics are constantly spewing - in fact, NHL teams sort themselves out quick enough that a 28 game season + playoffs could be pretty representative.

However, what I'm not hearing about is how the money is going to get distributed in such a scenario.  In a normal season before this lockout, players got 57% of hockey related revenue.  After this lockout, presumably NHL players will be getting 50% + some percentage of Make Whole, which percentage they'll calculate by putting 1,000 monkeys in a room with 1,000 abacuses and seeing how the beads fall.  While we don't know the exact dollar amount that will be added to Make Whole in 2013 yet, we can be pretty sure that the players are going to end up with somewhere between 51 and 53% of HRR this year if there is a season.

As I understand it, players are typically paid relative to days on the roster - the NHL season has 186 days (or thereabouts), and a player on a two-way contract gets paid his NHL rate relative to the number of days he spends on the NHL roster.  Presumably, that's how the NHL will function this year.  Let's say in the doomsday scenario, we have a 28 game season - that'll probably be something like 56 to 60 days.  Players would then get around 1/3rd of their salary this season, with adjustments relative to the new revenue split + Make Whole.  Ah, but a 28 game season also includes the playoffs - last season, the regular season was 1230 games and 86 playoff games.  Playoff games are typically higher priced, but even if we assume that they are three times the price of a regular season game, that would still only account for 20% the amount pulled in by the regular season and 17% of overall gate revenues.  (These are giant estimates with huge error ranges, but bear with me).

Right here you might be saying 'Well, who cares?'  The NHL escrow system cares.  In a 28 game season, the NHL would have 420 total games and presumably around 86 playoff games, give or take 5 either way.  That's a much larger percentage of the games being playoff ones.  Now with a system where everything isn't tied together, this wouldn't make a difference, but with the stupidity of the escrow system that I've pointed out in previous posts, what revenues the New York Rangers generate in the playoffs affect how much the New York Islanders ultimately pay out to players.  If playoff revenue constitutes a large portion of hockey-related revenue, that means making the playoffs is more important than ever - if we assume that playoff tickets are twice the cost of regular season ones, playoff revenue would constitute around 29% of total gate revenues.   If we operate under the assumption that the lower revenue teams tend to be less successful than high revenue teams, this would put an undue burden on low revenue clubs - low revenue clubs play 14 home dates, and if they miss the playoffs, that's it for them.  But they'd have to pay out salaries equal to 50% + Make Whole of the total HRR, which might be significantly more than it would be in a normal season because of the disproportion of playoff games.  These teams may well lose less money by not playing at all.

Now maybe with the players voting for the 5% cap inflator this past off-season, the cap (and consequently every player's 'written' salary) is so high relative to what revenues will end up at that it won't matter, but I have to imagine that NHL teams have made this calculation, and I think the longer this goes on, the more the small-market teams will be up for a cancellation of the season and an attempt to break Fehr and the union rather than playing an extremely short season.

It's A Minor Thing People Forget About The NHL - Or Is It?

I'm too lazy to try to sift through Google for articles about the 2004-05 lockout, but one thing I remember which may or may not be true was that the salary cap and floor were touted as a panacea for small-market owners.  I remember quotes from people like Peter Karmanos and Charles Wang.  Maybe those didn't happen - I wasn't following it too closely.  What's interesting is the teams that have changed ownership since the lockout.  These teams are as follows:

Anaheim
Buffalo
Dallas
Edmonton
Florida
Minnesota
Nashville
Phoenix
St. Louis
Tampa Bay
Toronto
Vancouver*
Winnipeg/Atlanta

* Aquilini bought 50% of the team during the lockout, bought the rest afterwards

If I called Anaheim, Dallas, Florida, Nashville, Phoenix, St. Louis, Tampa Bay, and Atlanta small-market teams would anyone get upset?  St. Louis is the only one that's questionable, maybe Anaheim too.  If I called Columbus, Carolina, Colorado, and Long Island small-market teams would anyone get upset?   Again, Colorado's questionable.  So we've got 8 out of 12 small-market teams changing hands between lockouts - why did those owners sell?  Hard to say in each case, but it's hard to imagine these teams have Bettman's ear.  Bettman was established as an NHL commissioner for 10 years before these people got on board as owners, and it's hard to know where they might stand on this prolonged work stoppage.  I don't believe that either party - Bettman or the New Owners - has the other's back.

Why Escrow Sucks For Owners, Too

The NHL is clearly obsessed with its 'cost-certainty' plan, whereby a rising tide drowns some boats while some never see water at all.  In fact, that appears to be one of the stumbling blocks between an agreement between the NHL and NHLPA - just how certain is cost-certainty going to be in the face of the lockout?

Cost certainty appears to have been a breakwater for the NHL - yes, NHL players had their salaries cut by 24% across the board.  But what if NHL fans didn't come back at all?  What if most NHL arenas resembled the Nassau Coliseum that season?  The NHL was only the second sports league to cancel its championship game, and Major League Baseball faced serious attendance repercussions when that battle was settled.  The NHL was not willing to bet on the fans coming back.  It needed some way to grab back salaries in case the fans were riled up.

The thresholds were:

HRR of 2.2 Bn and below:  54%
2.2 Bn to 2.4 Bn:  between 55-56%
2.4 Bn to 2.7 Bn:  between 56-57%
2.7 Bn+:  57%

The NHL hit 2.1 Bn its first year, something which it's hard to imagine the NHL believed possible.  They must've thrown these revenue thresholds in as a bone for players thinking they'd never have to pay, but here they are.  Not only did they have to pay 57%, they had to do so for several years.

The trouble with tying these things together in such a grand way is that television contracts don't make up a large percentage of hockey-related revenue in the NHL, and they certainly make up a smaller percentage of revenue than in any of the three other North American team sports.  So individual market growth determines how the collective does, but what if one market is failing?  Its failure gets transmitted to the other 29 teams as a bonus (they suppress HRR, thereby suppressing the salary cap and player salaries), meanwhile its 29 partners' relative success gets transmitted to it via the salary floor, making it impossible to run a profitable team.

But it goes deeper than this - let's take a team like the Islanders that had several players on their team who could have been due bonus money last season, names like John Tavares, Nino Niederreiter, and Jay Pandolfo.  The only players eligible for bonuses in the NHL are old players, young players, or players who've been injured, and the bonus thresholds are set in the CBA - teams can't give out a bonus for scoring 1 goal, for instance.  These bonuses function as dead cap space, mostly - it is often very difficult to reach these incentives, and it's almost a guarantee that Pandolfo and Niederreiter reached none of their objectives.  Each could've been due as much as $2.2 million in bonuses.  Assuming the Islanders were exactly at the cap floor (which they weren't, but let's assume that they were), that was $2.2 million that the Islanders did not have to pay in salary.  Aha - but here's why escrow is stupid - owners have to pay out 57% of hockey-related revenue in a given year.  So if e.g. every team is at the salary floor for some reason, escrow makes up for that shortfall by forcing owners to pay more to each player out of their own pocket until 57% of HRR is reached.  So let's go back to that 2.2 million - the Islanders didn't pay it out.  You know who did?  Every other team in the NHL.  Well, the Islanders too, but they and the 29 other teams effectively split that 2.2 million.  Some years they may not have to pay out any extra money, depending on how the other chips fall, and some years they might've had to pay out the entire 2.2 million, but that's how the system is set up.  And it's profoundly dumb that the other owners pay for the Islanders' loophole manipulation, just as it's stupid that as a result of escrow the players all pay for the top players to have huge front-loaded contracts.  The system is broken - I just can't see the NHL bothering to fix it.  For some reason this is what they think is best for the league, even though the Islanders' manipulation is a symptom that the salary floor is in desperate need of repair.

The league thinks the best fix is to not allow bonuses to count against the cap for teams presently below the salary floor.  Happy lockout, everyone.

Players' Tack After NHL Offer - 10/17

I was going to tweet all of this, but it will come out looking like garbage and fill up everyone's timeline with nonsense.  I remembered I had a blog I used to post at, so here goes -

The owners have made an attempt to save the entire season with their latest offer.  This is not something they've seemed remotely interested in doing in recent weeks, and while this offer is somewhat onerous, it is not the absurd 'You'll get nothing and like it' CBA offer they presented in July.  This is why the players hired Fehr - to turn up the heat at a moment like this.  It may seem ridiculous, but Fehr should say - Look, the union will vote on whatever we get to at the end of this negotiating session in order to save an enormous chunk of the season, but if that does not pass, we will not be giving or receiving offers until April 1, 2013.  This is akin to when George Costanza preemptively broke up with a woman and then said '[Are you] shocked?'   The owners have been the ones not afraid to cancel games in an attempt to steamroll the union, but here is a little shaft of light at the bottom of the well.  If the owners are actually concerned about the season, they'll respond by negotiating in good faith.  If they say take or leave it to this offer they've presented, they will demonstrate that they were never serious.

The players' counter offer should include mandatory rises in HRR % over certain revenue thresholds.  It should include less of an initial giveback.  It should include a final year, which, if no CBA can be agreed to before that, the players' share of HRR% jumps significantly.  This offers lockout protection for players and owners.  The rest of the offer can be whatever, those things can all be hashed out.  Still, the union's goal remains getting the most they possibly can, and their only opportunity to do so is right now.

Why It's Inevitable That Your Favorite Player Ends Up An Islander, Coyote, Or Panther

I've held off on writing about the ongoing CBA negotiations, largely because all we have are first offers.  Yes, the owners' offer is ridiculous.  Yes, the players' offer gives a framework to help alleviate the issues that exist between rich and poor NHL teams by offering significant revenue sharing.  No, the owners probably won't like those aspects of it, since the salary cap exists largely as a profit generator for big-market teams rather than the cost control for mid-market teams that it was promised to be.

The question I've had throughout is how can the smaller market owners go with the same system we've got? I recognize that the NHL's first offer is a first offer, and so they asked basically to roll back salaries by a large percentage, as well as roll back time to around 1972.  These rollbacks would no doubt help out small market teams even if their paltry revenues aren't augmented in any way.  But shave back the revenue percentage and change nothing else significantly about the NHL's salary cap or revenue structure, and it seems like we're right back here in seven years, with big market teams still raking in profits while the mid-market teams break even (hopefully) and the smaller markets do everything in their power to avoid paying the full amount mandated by the salary floor.  How do small markets typically avoid paying the full amount of the salary floor?

A:  Contracts with lots of bonuses

I'm curious to see whether performance bonuses remain in the CBA for players 35+ - I imagine they will.  The Islanders gave Jay Pandolfo $800,000 worth of performance bonuses - he promptly scored 1 goal in 62 games, so I can't imagine he managed to hit them.

This also applies to young players on entry-level contracts - the Islanders also left Nino Niederreiter and his $1.925M in unreachable performance bonuses on the roster while he scored 1 goal in 55 games.  Still, it's tough to find players who are eligible for bonuses - only players on ELCs, 35+ players, or players who've missed an entire season to injury can get them.

B:  Contracts whose cap hits are greater than their salaries

Here's the real payoff for a small market team.  Let's assume that the owners to a large degree win this round of negotiations: the salary cap comes down, the salary floor stays in place, the players' cut of the revenue is heavily axed, and maximum contract limits are established.  This means an end to deals where a player gets way less than his actual market value as a tradeoff for a long contract that's significantly front-loaded.  We'll begin seeing contracts that are closer to the NHL maximum as teams are now unable to throw a bunch of cheap years on the back end to lower the cap.  This means that the salary cap will become a going concern for half the league again, like it was back in 2010 - teams will actually have to consider not keeping all the players they want to keep.  What players will be the first ones to go if teams do have a cap crunch several years down the road?  Why, the very players who were signed to very long deals for 'cheap' cap hits.  These players will be near the ends of their careers and likely won't be worth their cap hits any longer.  Plus, if the salary floor doesn't move or go away, we'll still see teams trying their hardest to hit it as inexpensively as possible.  So, if this is such a great solution to the cap floor problem, when will we start to see these players move?

To answer that question, I decided to look at all the players who have very long contracts (7+ years), the point at which their salary becomes less than their cap hit, and the clauses they have in their contract. I excluded players such as Miikka Kiprusoff and Patrik Elias who are still providing solid value for their teams even as their salaries have dipped below what I've termed the inflection point - the point at which these players' salaries dip below their cap hit. I've also noted if they have a No Trade or No Movement Clause in their contract. All numbers and clauses courtesy of capgeek.com.

Player	Inflection Year	Yrs Left	Contract Clauses
Scott Gomez	2012-13	2	Limited NTC
Ryan Malone	2012-13	3	NMC/Limited NTC
Daniel Briere	2013-14	2	NMC
Zdeno Chara	2016-17	1*	NMC
Mike Richards	2016-17	4	N/A
Johan Franzen	2016-17	4	N/A
Ilya Bryzgalov	2016-17	4	NMC
Marian Hossa	2016-17	5	N/A
Niklas Kronwall	2017-18	2	Limited NTC
Vincent Lecavalier	2017-18	3	NMC
Brad Richards	2017-18	3	NMC
Christian Ehrhoff	2017-18	4	NMC
Duncan Keith	2017-18	6	NMC
Henrik Zetterberg	2018-19	3	N/A
Roberto Luongo	2018-19	4	Limited NTC
Jeff Carter	2018-19	4	N/A
Shea Weber	2018-19	8	N/A
Ilya Kovalchuk	2019-20	6	NTC
Jonathan Quick	2020-21	3	N/A
Zach Parise	2021-22	4	NMC
Ryan Suter	2021-22	4	NMC
Sidney Crosby	2022-23	3	NMC

* - Zdeno Chara was signed under the new rules, the final year of his contract is equal to its cap hit because it occurs after he is 40.

Not all of these players are going to play all of these years. In fact, I expect several of them to not play any years once their salary has dipped below the cap hit. Still, in the summer of 2016, we're looking at Hossa and Franzen each dipping below the inflection point, each without any sort of no-trade or no-movement clause, and Franzen will be 36, Hossa 37. If either guy has fallen well below their performance now, I expect their clubs will look at dealing them, and I have to imagine teams near the salary floor will be eager to buy.  What low-budget team wouldn't want a formerly great player on a cheap contract with a high cap hit and no no-trade clause to deal with?  And yeah, nearly half of these players have NMCs, but all NMCs really prevent are a player being placed on waivers.  It's difficult for a player to keep his team from trading him if he knows that they really want him out.

Are these contracts a panacea for what ills the NHL have-nots? No, not by a long shot.  It's unclear just how many of these players will actually finish out their contracts, or will even finish out the beginning of their salary declines.  Furthermore, the cap savings in some of these deals varies greatly - for some it's only a few hundred thousand dollars in the first few years.  Regardless of how this CBA turns out, I expect we'll see a fair number of great players ending their careers wearing a funny-looking uniform, a Band-Aid on a long-term problem.