Which Teams Are Giving Their Big Money Players The Most (And Least) Help
Good news for the Carolina Hurricanes and Edmonton Oilers .... bad news for the New York Rangers and Toronto Maple Leafs.
At the most basic level NHL teams need three primary ingredients to seriously contend for — and ultimately win — a Stanley Cup.
They need at least two high-level, top-line stars, with at least one of them ideally being a center. You need a player that is going to take over the occasional game or has the ability to go on a heater over two weeks and drag the team along. Somebody that can change a game — or series — at a moments notice. Every Cup winner has at least two of these guys.
They need competent goaltending. It doesn’t need to be a Vezina Trophy winner, but you need somebody that is at least going to keep you in games and give you a chance on most nights.
They need something that resembles at least a little bit of depth. I don’t care how good your top-two or three players are or how many superstars you have at the top of the lineup, they are all going to be prone to scoring droughts. It is unavoidable. Nobody is immune to it. It will happen. It will happen at some point during a long playoff run. Sometimes they just hit a cold spell. Sometimes the two teams have their star players cancel each other out. Whatever the cause there is going to come a time where your Sidney Crosby, Nathan MacKinnon, Jonathan Toews or Nikita Kucherov doesn’t score. So you better have a complementary cast of players around them that can help pick up the slack and impact a game themselves.
The latter point brings us to the topic of today’s post where we will take a look at the teams that have done the most — and the least — to complement their big-money stars.
I have done this before in the past, and while it might not be the most foolproof way of analyzing depth, I do think it gives you at least a close proximity to it.
Here is what we are looking at: I took the top-three salary cap hits (excluding goalies) from every NHL team and look at how each team has done during 5-on-5 play WITHOUT them on the ice in terms of goal-differential and expected goal share.
Players have to have at least played a game this season or been part of the team’s plans when the season began. So players like Jakub Voracek or any of the contracts that have been moved as part of LTIR deals and paper transactions are excluded.
Goalies are excluded because, simply, I would argue they are an entirely different animal in terms of impacting a team’s successes or failure. A great goalie playing at the top of their game is going to drag along a mediocre team with no star power to playoff contention. A bad goalie is going to sink any team. They are in their own category.
In theory your top-three cap hits are — in the majority of cases — going to be your best, most-used and most-productive players. There are some rare exceptions to that, but in most cases that theory holds up. They will take up most of the salary cap space. How a team uses that remaining available space around them is a good indicator of much their farm system is producing and how good their front office is at finding bargains.
So which teams are doing the best to support their top players? Well, I have some good news for Carolina, Vancouver, Winnipeg, Edmonton and Vegas.
I also have some very bad news for the New York Rangers and Toronto Maple Leafs.
Let’s get into it.
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