After Sebastian Aho signed an 8-year extension that carries a cap hit of $9.75M on July 26th (that’ll take effect next season), we started thinking about how we can quantify the value of the top contracts for each team in the Eastern Conference. In terms of roster construction and cap management, the goal is to always get the most bang for your buck, and we wanted to see who’s actually getting what they’re paying a premium for.

Not only is it immensely important for teams to have elite talent to become an elite team, there needs to be some cap space left to have the right, high-quality supporting cast around them. Obviously, the best players in the world are paid handsomely — but with all of these advanced statistics that we have available now, can we quantify the actual bang-for-the-buck each team is getting?

Methodology

We started by looking at the top three cap hits for each team among forwards and defensemen. When teams had a forward and a defenseman tied for their third and fourth highest cap hits, the tie went to the forward. We also did not include players that earned in the top three cap hits for their respective club, but were on the long term injury list for all of last season.

Removing goaltenders from this analysis was a conscious choice — goaltending metrics aren’t quite as easily mapped and merged with skater metrics, so perhaps goaltending contract value is something we’ll cover another time.

After taking the top three cap hits, we sliced the salary data with a few key metrics:

• Average age of the top three earners
• Total cap hit for the top three earners
• Percentage of the salary cap those top three contracts accumulated
• Total Goals Above Replacement (GAR)
• GAR per million dollars
• Points per game

Using these metrics as key data points, we can start assessing the value of the top three contracts that each team is working with.

The statistics used in this post are courtesy of Hockey Reference and Evolving Hockey. The salary cap information is courtesy of CapFriendly. If you’d like to learn more about the statistical terms used in this post, please check out our NHL Analytics Glossary.

Average ages

First up, let’s look at the average ages for the top three earners for each team in the Eastern Conference. This will help us get an idea of the various stages teams go through with their core group of players: rebuilding, on-the-rise, contending, and aging-out.

There’s also players in this group that fit a similar timeline model: young players who are locked up to long term deals who haven’t entered their prime, prime-year players, and aging veterans with bloated contracts.

Average age only tells us so much. Based on what we can see here, it’s no surprise that Washington and Pittsburgh have the two oldest top earners by five whole years compared to the third oldest top three earners. That average age is definitely buoyed by two veteran generational talents in Alex Ovechkin and Sidney Crosby, as well as long-time core pieces like Nicklas Backstrom, John Carlson, and Evgeni Malkin.

Then you have the “younger” teams like Ottawa, who have their core three of Brady Tkachuk, Tim Stutzle, and Thomas Chabot locked up. Chabot is the oldest of the three at 26 years old. Ottawa is a team that’s pretty close to emerging into the mix of playoff contenders, and once they cross that threshold, they could be in the mix for quite some time.

The rest of the teams are a smattering of clubs that have their top three earners at an average age between 26 and 30.

Percentage of the cap

Now that we know the average age demographics of each team, let’s take a look at how much of the salary cap these top three contracts for each team accrue by percentage:

Toronto is no real surprise to have the highest percentage of the cap associated with their top three earners. With Auston Matthews ($11,640,250), John Tavares ($11M), and Mitch Marner ($10,903,000) making up a large portion of Toronto’s core group, they don’t have a ton of wiggle room down the roster for complimentary pieces. It’s also fair to note that Toronto is currently about $2,068,950 over the cap ceiling, even with the use of LTIR.

Other than that, we see teams like Philadelphia who have a very low percentage of the cap reserved by their top three earners (which doesn’t include Sean Couturier and Cam Atkinson, since they didn’t play last season). This is due to the Flyers going down the route of a rebuild, and their “top talent” isn’t exactly up to snuff with the rest of the conference.

Then you have a real outlier with Pittsburgh. Although they have the highest average age for their top three earners, they also have relatively affordable contracts. Crosby leads the way with an $8.7M cap hit, then Jeff Petry at $6.25M, then Evgeni Malkin at $6.1M. This is a vast divergence from how the Capitals have paid their top three earners, with Ovechkin ($9.5M), Backstrom ($9.2M), and Carlson ($8M).

GAR per million

In an attempt to provide a valuation of “bang for your buck”, we took the total Goals Above Replacement (GAR) value for each teams’ top three earners, and then divided that by the amount of millions in dollars that each team accrued. So, for example, if a team’s top three earners accrued 10 GAR and accounted for $25M in total cap, we’d take 10 divided by 25 to give a GAR/$M value of .4.

Here’s how each of the teams did in this regard:

Tampa, Boston, and New Jersey got the most value out of their top three earners, and that’s even taking into account Timo Meier’s new contract with the Devils and David Pastrnak’s big raise with the Bruins, with their GAR from last season.

Tampa leading the way is rather interesting, considering that they have the third oldest average age among their top three earners in the conference.

Obviously, the elephant in the room is Washington, sitting there at 15th in the conference with the only negative GAR/$M. A couple key factors for why the Capitals struggled here:

• Backstrom’s return to the lineup after a lengthy rehabilitation process for his hip procedure
• Carlson’s head injury and amount of games missed
• The GAR model really hating Ovechkin’s defensive capabilities (he had 8.7 offensive GAR vs -10.6 defensive GAR). Ovechkin is certainly no Selke candidate, but I’m not sure he’s that bad defensively.

For Caps fans, I don’t think there’s many that don’t question the value the Caps are getting for the money, especially with Backstrom’s contract. In a perfect world, the Capitals would have been able to get Ovechkin and Backstrom to sign more team-friendly deals to stay with the team like the Penguins were able to get with Malkin and Kris Letang last season.

Points per game

Typically, the top earners in the league are players that generate points. In an effort to provide an alternative statistical view to just GAR, we sliced the data with points per game. Points per game is important because it helps normalize the production of players based on games played, not just pure scoring output.

Here’s how each teams’ top three earners in the Eastern Conference performed in this regard:

Although we had thought that Ovechkin’s point production last season might buoy the Capitals into a bit higher of a ranking, it wasn’t necessarily the case here. We can see again that Tampa gets immense production out of their top three earners (Brayden Point, Nikita Kucherov, and Steven Stamkos). Toronto, even with the bloated contracts, produces at nearly as high a level as Tampa.

The only two teams that the Capitals outpaced in terms of PPG was two rebuilding teams in Philadelphia and Montreal. Montreal has youngsters Nick Suzuki (23 years old) and Cole Caufield (22) being pulled down by Brendan Gallagher (31 years old). Philadelphia is underwhelming and plays in a John Tortorella “defense-first-and-always” system.

Conclusion

Since we’re a Caps blog first and foremost, I’m going to end off this piece with an opinion on the state of the roster. It’s no secret that with the cyclical nature of teams’ competitive status that you can’t be a Cup competitive team forever. We’re starting to see the impact of paying the oldest players on your roster the most, and the result tends to be the cap inflexibility to really improve your roster.

With the Caps adding Max Pacioretty and Joel Edmundson this off-season, it appears that the hopes of this team returning to the playoffs really hinges on the team being healthier than last season, potential rebound seasons from players like Evgeny Kuznetsov and Anthony Mantha, and a fresh voice behind the bench in Spencer Carbery.

If the team is healthier, resonates with Carbery, and key players play to their capabilities, then this team could certainly be in the mix for a playoff spot. If we see the same health issues and performance from last season, the Capitals will be a lottery team. This is all dependent on if MacLellan actually pulls through on a trade to shake up the Caps’ top six forward group.

I think we’re closer to a rebuild than we are to being a team that competes for the Stanley Cup at this point, but all eras come to an end. I’d be ecstatic to be proven wrong by this team.

By Justin Trudel