Building the worst possible roster of NHL contracts that's still somehow cap compliant

New York Times

3 days ago

Six years ago, I wrote a post based on a premise that I thought was stupid, bordering on pointlessly absurd. If you know my work, that's really saying something.
A few days earlier, I'd tried to build a roster using the best players and contracts that I could fit under the salary cap, which is not an especially dumb idea and was actually kind of fun. But then, somebody asked me to flip the script and build a cap-compliant roster of the league's worst contracts. At first, that seems fine. But then you get into it and realize that 'bad contracts' and 'cap compliant' don't work together at all, as you find yourself being priced out of some of the very worst deals because you don't have room for them. The whole thing didn't make one bit of sense.
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Needless to say, I did it anyway, the readers made it one of my most popular posts of the season, and lately some of you have been bugging me to do it again. Fine, why not, it's August and nobody will remember this ever happened.
I'll say two things for the concept. One, the timing is good, since Dom just finished the heavy lifting of walking us through the league's best and worst contracts plus everything in between. I really appreciate those pieces every summer because while any idiot can pontificate on contracts, it's nice to have some actual data to back up those opinions.
And second, I do think there's some value in looking at 'bad' contracts that fall a little further down the pay scale. We all focus on the cap hits that look like eight-figure mistakes, and for obvious reasons. But while those types of misses at the top of the lineup can doom a team, so can overpaying on too many depth spots. And as we're about to see, teams sure do seem to love to do that.
But first, a few ground rules™:
All cap and contract info in this piece comes from the fine folks at PuckPedia.
This is going to be ridiculous and way harder than it should be. In other words, perfect summer content. Let's do this.
Right off the bat, the conflict driving this whole exercise comes into focus: We want to overspend, but not too much, because we have to save room for all the bad skater contracts to come.
That isn't a huge issue here, because I'm not sure that any of the biggest goalie contracts are obviously bad. We already said we can't use Carey Price, while Sergei Bobrovsky only has one year left of his $10 million hit. And while I doubt Igor Shesterkin's deal will age well, especially without any clear next man up to drive the goalie market forward, I'm not going to spend $11.5 million of my space just so he can win the Vezina next year and make everyone laugh at me.
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Moving down the list, Andrei Vasilevskiy was just the Vezina runner-up, Connor Hellebuyck won the Hart and Jake Oettinger's deal is fine. The first name that at least makes me pause is Jeremy Swayman, coming off a rough first year at $8.25 million, and Juuse Saros at $7.74 million should be even more tempting given I just said it was a bad contract. But while the Saros deal is scary, he's still a very capable NHL starter at the very least, which means we can do better. Well, worse.
In the end, it came down to three names: Tristan Jarry, Elvis Merzlikins and Philipp Grubauer, all of whom have contracts well over $5 million that run for multiple years to come. Of the three, Grubauer is the oldest, the most expensive and has the worst recent numbers, so he's in. The other two feel like a coin flip with virtually identical contracts, but Jarry wasn't awful the year before last, while Merzlikins hasn't had a save percentage over .900 since 2021-22 and costs just a bit more. I'll go with him, meaning my two goalies are Philipp Grubauer ($5.9 million through 2027) and Elvis Merzlikins ($5.4 million through 2027).
Cap space spent so far: With two players down and 18 to go, I've already spent $11.3 million on some very shaky goaltending, leaving me $84.2 million in space.
Remember when Erik Karlsson and Drew Doughty signed their mega-contracts way back in 2019 and we all figured they'd reset the blue line market? Six years and one pandemic-inspired flat cap later, they're still sitting at the top of the defense list, with only Rasmus Dahlin even coming all that close. Doughty and (especially) Karlsson aren't worth their cap hits these days, but both have only two years left, so I'm not willing to eat a huge chunk of my cap on their deals.
Moving down the list, I did run into two deals that feel like serious candidates for our roster. The first is Darnell Nurse and his $9.25 million cap hit that continues to throw a wrench into the Oilers' hopes, while the other is the new Ivan Provorov deal at $8.5 million that felt like a case of the Columbus tax taken to extremes. I think you could make a strong case that Nurse's deal is a far bigger problem for his current team, given where the Oilers and Blue Jackets each are in the championship cycle. But for our purposes, Provorov has three additional years to worry about on a seven-year deal, so I'll take him and save a bit of space in the process. Ivan Provorov is our top defenseman. And I'll pair him with Brady Skjei, whose seven-year, $7 million UFA deal with the Predators already looks awful just one year in.
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That's a top pair that will cost us north of $15 million, so we'll have to go a bit cheaper on the other options. Luckily, we have plenty of options, because GMs love middling blueliners. We could look to Detroit for Ben Chiarot or Justin Holl, but both those deals expire next year. Kevin Bahl is at least worth a look, but at 25 he's got enough upside to defend that deal. Instead, I decided to go with a pair of $4.5 million UFAs: Cody Ceci, who signed with the Kings this summer for four years, and Ryan Graves, entering year three of a six-year deal in Pittsburgh.
For our bottom pair, there are still plenty of bad deals out there to choose from. But with some of the league's worst contracts going to forwards, I feel like we want to save our cap space as much as possible. Can you go cheap on bad contracts? In theory, no, but here we are. Give me Carolina's Sean Walker and his four more years at $3.6 million, and the Islanders' Scott Mayfield, who has them on the hook for $3.5 million for another five years.
Cap space spent so far: We just added six defensemen at a cap cost of $31.6 million, an average just north of $5.25 million each. With our two goalies, that brings our team total to $42.9 million, leaving $52.6 million to spend on 12 forwards. That's… not a lot, actually. We're going to face a cap crunch up front. What a completely unforeseeable problem.
The temptation is to dive right into the league's worst deals, but I know from last time that won't work. The key up front is going to be finding bad contracts that are also reasonably cheap, which of course is ridiculous but here we are. So rather than starting with my top line, I'm going to do this backwards and chip away at the depth first.
So how's this for a fourth line: Tampa's Yanni Gourde between Utah's Brandon Tanev and Montreal's Jake Evans. The good news is this line only costs us about $7.7 million: $2.33 million for Gourde, $2.5 million for Tanev and $2.85 million for Evans. The bad news is these three combined for just 28 goals last year — and the worse news is we're on the hook to this bunch for 13 total years, six of them to Gourde. Oh, and two of those guys are already 33.
That group works well enough for our purposes, so let's move up and try the same approach on the third line. We'll start with a player the Maple Leafs traded for this summer in Dakota Joshua, who still has three years left on a deal that carries a $3.25 million hit. He'll have a pair of $3 million wingers in the Blue Jackets' Mathieu Olivier, who's just starting a new six-year deal, and the Islanders' Pierre Engvall, who somehow still has five years left on that seven-year extension that I could have sworn he signed a decade ago. That's north of $9 million for three forwards coming off a year that saw them combine for 61 points, over half of those by Olivier.
I know what you're thinking: This forward group features game-breaking offensive talent, but are they gritty enough? Not yet, but we're about to fix that. Let's welcome a pair of heart-and-soul forwards to the lineup, with Boston's Tanner Jeannot and Edmonton's Trent Frederic. Jeannot makes $3.4 million on a five-year UFA deal from this summer that got rave reviews, while Frederic got the maximum eight years and $3.85 million from an Edmonton team with no other pressing needs. We'll play them with Yakov Trenin, whose UFA deal with the Wild from last summer still has three years left at $3.5 million, which might feel a bit rich for 15 points of production, except that makes him the top scorer on this line.
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With that, we've filled out three forward lines with dicey down-the-lineup contracts, none of which top the $4 million mark. That means we've got money to spend on our first line. What could go wrong?
Let's start with two of the prize catches from the UFA class of 2024: Boston's Elias Lindholm and Seattle's Chandler Stephenson. Lindholm's debut season with the Bruins saw him top out at 47 points, which doesn't quite live up to his $7.75 million price tag, but that's fine because he still has six more seasons to figure it out and forwards often get better after turning 30. Stephenson is even older but a bit cheaper, coming in at a bargain-value price of $6.25 million for the next six years.
That leaves us with one spot to fill and just over $10 million to work with, and I'm guessing you can figure out what that means. Yes, we'll finish our roster with one of those players we wanted all along: Calgary's Jonathan Huberdeau, who'll carry a $10.5 million cap hit through 2031.
Cap space spent so far: We spent a total of $52.18 million on our forwards. Adding that to the $42.9 million we'd already spent on the back end, that bring us to a grand total of $95.1 million, just under the $95.5 million cap. We did it — and with more cap space to spare than the Flyers currently have.
Here's what we ended up with:
That roster is… well, it's certainly a list of NHL players, isn't it folks.
On the surface, sure, this team doesn't look very good. One area of concern is offense, where our 18 skaters combined to score just 173 goals last year. That's a team-wide average of just over two per game, which may be an issue given our two goalies gave up 253 goals in a combined 78 starts.
Our leading scorer is Huberdeau, with 28 goals and 62 points. Our second leading goal-scorer is Olivier, who had 18. All told, we have just seven guys who managed double-digit goals last year, one of whom is noted sniper Skjei.
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So sure, it's not a great roster today. But let's look to the future. This time next year, we'll have freed up a total of (runs numbers) no cap space whatsoever. Yeah. Not a single contract on this roster expires next year, so we're stuck with this bunch until 2027. But we lose both goalies that year, which is always good roster management. As for the skaters, three are signed through 2028, four more through 2029, and three more through 2030. That means that five years from now, in the distant future of 2030, we'll still have over $49 million in cap hit committed to eight players, including our entire first line. We're somehow on the hook to Frederic through 2033, which won't even be a real year. In total, we've committed to 95 years' worth of contracts. But the cap is going up, so it's probably fine.
Also, we're old. The average age of this team is 30.15, and our youngest player is Frederic, 27.
And by the way, when I say we're stuck with the guys, I mean it — only one player on the entire roster doesn't have some form of trade protection, that being Trenin. Sean loses his NTC in 2027. Every other player has no-trade coverage of some form through the entire life of their deal.
In return for our commitment, we've locked in six of Dom's ten worst contracts, including the top four. And we've spread the love around the league reasonably well — the Blue Jackets lead the way with three players, while the Bruins, Kraken and Islanders both have two, and 11 teams have one, meaning almost half the league (15 of 32 teams) is represented.
I can't decide if this entire exercise was depressing or liberating or maybe both. At the very least, I hope it made you feel better about your own team's cap situation. Remember, it can always be worse. So much worse.
(Top photo of Philipp Grubauer and Chandler Stephenson: Steph Chambers / Getty Images)
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