When you go to your team’s Cap Friendly page, how many red arrows do you see?
With apologies to those mythical Gary Bettman fans who don’t care about the salary cap, everyone else knows the red arrow. It’s the little icon that shows up on a Cap Friendly team page, denoting a contract that has so much term left that it doesn’t fit on the screen. Right now, that means the red arrow shows up next to any deal that stretches to at least 2029.
How many does your team have? Welcome to the Red Arrow Index, a new analytics tool that was created based on a long and thorough process of me making it up in my head during a podcast a few weeks ago.
Like all great and complicated analytics, the Red Arrow Index needs a bit of context. A high score isn’t necessarily bad, and neither is a low one. As a rule of thumb, a team that’s old and bad wants to be at zero, but a team that’s young and good is happy with a high number. It’s tempting to describe it as “the dreaded red arrow”, and that would apply often, but not always.
Still, we can learn a thing or two from going through the league and seeing who comes in where. For example, there are three teams who score a zero on the RAI, two of which were not surprising and one of which very much was. And as for the team with the highest score in the league… well, you might already have a guess, but we’ll get there.
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