Let's build the worst possible roster of contracts that's still somehow cap compliant

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 as 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.

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.

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What’s the best cap team you can build for 2025-26 using today's contracts?

Back in 2019, my readers wanted me to build the best possible cap-compliant roster I could assemble using existing contracts. That’s not an especially unique idea, and it’s not even all that challenging if you load up on entry-level contracts. So we added a twist: We were trying to look three years into the future, to the 2021-22 season. That meant we had to rely on long-term contracts, with no entry-level deals or other short-term bargains.

You can find that post here, and I eventually revisited it to see how it turned out. In short: I scored big with guys like Nathan MacKinnon, Elias Lindholm and Aleksander Barkov. I also whiffed on John Gibson over Connor Hellbuyck, and somehow Paul Byron ended up on the team.

All in all, I did OK. But I want another shot. So today, I’m giving myself one, as we revisit the concept in an updated attempt to build for the future. We don’t know what the cap will be in 2025-26, and the pandemic era made it tougher to guess. But we do have Elliotte Friedman’s report from a few months ago that the league was projecting $92 million, so we’ll go with that.

As a refresher, here are the ground rules:

• We’re focused on the 2025-26 season here, meaning every contract we pick has to stretch at least that far. Extensions that are signed but haven’t kicked in yet are fine, but otherwise we can't use anyone whose current contract expires before then. Boston fans keep telling me that pending UFA David Pastrnak will take another hometown discount, and I’d never doubt them, but until that happens he can’t be on our roster.
• We want the best team possible in 2025-26, not today, meaning we’re projecting ahead and age will be an important factor.
• We don’t care about real dollars, only cap hit.
• We need 12 forwards, six defensemen and two goalies. We don’t need to have any spares, although we can add some at the end if we have room, which we absolutely will not. We’ll try to balance centers and wingers and defensemen playing on their proper side, but we won’t obsess over it. After all, these guys have three years to adjust to new positions if we need them to.
• We’re assuming everyone will be healthy in three years, with the exception of guys like Shea Weber who are already LTIR-retired.

There are 171 players with deals that run through 2026, ranging from Nathan MacKinnon’s $12.6 million cap hit to Paul Cotter’s $775,000. One of those players is better than the other. One is also more likely to end up on our roster, but we’ll get to that.

Let’s get started, building from the net out as all good teams do.

Goaltenders

This was the toughest position last time, and it’s not much easier this time around. There are only 14 goalies in the league with deals that run through 2025-26, and one of them is Carey Price. Among the others, it’s a hard pass on names like Elvis Merzlikins, Philipp Grubauer, Jack Campbell and Sergei Bobrovsky. I won’t fall for John Gibson this time. And at a lofty $9.5 million, I don’t think we’ll be able to afford Andrei Vasilevskiy.

That leaves seven candidates for two spots, and here’s where things look a little brighter than they did a few years ago. This time, there are actually a handful of reasonably priced options, including apparent all-star Stuart Skinner at $2.6 million and Pyotr Kochetkov at just $2 million. There’s also two solid young options in Spencer Knight at $4.5 million, and Thatcher Demko at $5 million.

A few months ago, this would have felt like a slam dunk: Demko would be our starter. But he’s been awful this year, which makes me a little nervous. Knight hasn’t been much better, but at 24 in 2025-26 he should just be entering his prime. Of course, he may already have turned out to be a bust. I’m not sure I trust Skinner, and Kochetkov is in the AHL right now and could be yet another fake Hurricanes goalie that they bail on before the rest of us figure it out.

Even with all those reasonable doubts, I can’t talk myself into a more expensive option like Jordan Binnington or a 35-year-old Jacob Markstrom. So I’ll roll the dice on a cheap-ish combo that will free up money elsewhere. Give me Thatcher Demko and Pyotr Kochetkov as my duo.

Cap space spent so far: A tidy $7 million on two players, leaving us with $85 million for our 18 skaters, an average of $4.7 million each.

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Do these five stars have bad contracts? Welcome to Salary Cap Court

There was a time when fans could get away with not caring about player salaries. Except in an indirect way, it wasn’t their money, so who really cared if some rich owner was paying a bit too much for a third-line center? Maybe he missed a payment on one of his yachts, but otherwise, no harm no foul.

Then the NHL became a hard cap league. Today, salaries – or more specifically, cap hits – are absolutely crucial. Squeezing as much value as possible into an artificially limited salary structure is the key to building and maintaining a contender, and even one big mistake can derail a roster. In today’s NHL, as I’ve phrased it before, a good player with a bad contract isn’t a good player.

We’ve had some fun over the years with some of the league’s worst signings, even building an entire cap-compliant roster out of them. But for the most part, those were the contracts nobody argues about. We all know that Brent Seabrook’s deal is bad. Nobody’s calling Bobby Ryan a value contract these days. We’ve beaten Milan Lucic’s deal into the ground, picked it up and dusted it off, then beaten it down again. With very few exceptions, even the most diehard fans aren’t defending those kind of deals anymore.

Other contracts aren’t as simple, and those are the ones we’re going to focus on here. Welcome to Salary Cap Court, where we’ll weigh the pros and cons of five contracts that might be bad, but maybe might not.

To be clear, every contract that makes its way to cap court will be questionable; there won’t be any good deals here. But we want to know if they’re outright bad, or merely not great. We’ll make the case for both sides of the argument, and then we’ll render a verdict, passing judgment on whatever’s left of a deal and deciding once and for all whether it really deserves to have the dreaded “bad contract” label slapped on it.

Make sense? Then be seated, because Salary Cap Court is in session. Let’s bring out our first defendant.

Erik Karlsson, Sharks

The details: Eight years and a cap hit of $11.5 million, thanks to an extension signed days before he would have become an unrestricted free agent last summer.

The case that it’s a bad contract: Karlsson has two Norris Trophies, should maybe have more, and might have been the very best defenseman of the 2010s. But everything in that sentence is in the past tense, and with his new contract only kicking in this year, the present and future are all that matters. The reality is that he didn’t play at a truly elite level in his last year in Ottawa, he didn’t live up to the hype in his first year in San Jose, and he hasn’t been especially great this year.

If you’re trying to figure out why, it’s not hard to round up the usual suspects: injury and age. He had a groin injury last year that resulted in surgery, and a heel problem before that. Mix in the fact that he turns 30 at the end of this season, and it’s not hard to wonder if his recent decline is permanent. That doesn’t mean he can’t still be a solid player, or even a very good one. But he’s being paid like he’s the very best defenseman in the league, and it sure looks like he isn’t that player anymore.

The case that it might be OK: Injuries heal, and we’ve already seen Karlsson overcome a more serious scare in 2013, when he missed most of the season with a sliced Achilles. He came back from that just fine, posting three straight first-team all-star seasons. As for age, we’ve seen plenty of superstar blueliners play into their late-30s and beyond, including Ray Bourque, Al MacInnis, Chris Chelios and Nicklas Lidstrom. Karlsson’s always been a great skater, but his most important talent is his vision and instinct, and that won’t fade even if he loses a half-step.

Sure, he’s been disappointing this season. So has everyone on the Sharks. The year has been a disaster. We can’t just throw out the whole season, but we shouldn’t lean on it too much either. Last year might be a better example of what Karlsson’s floor could be, and it’s worth remembering that even in an off-year his underlying numbers were decent and he still played well enough to show up on a handful of Norris ballots. If that’s the worst-case, it’s not bad. And his best-case looks a lot like his 2017 playoff run, when he almost managed to drag a very average Senators team all the way to the final. That wasn’t that long ago, and he was fighting through injuries then too.

The bottom line is that Karlsson is a generational talent, and when he’s fully healthy he’s basically been unstoppable. Every long-term deal is a gamble in some sense, but if you’re going to roll the dice, this is exactly the sort of player you do it on.

Key comparisons: Drew Doughty is the obvious one, with a similar eight-year deal that carries an $11 million hit. We’d also want to look at Roman Josi (8 x $9 million) and teammate Brent Burns (8 x $8 million). There’s also John Carlson, who signed his 8-year, $8 million cap hit deal at a similar age and is delivering the sort of dynamic Norris-caliber season Karlsson used to, but for a lot less money.

The verdict: The case against the Karlsson deal is a strong one, but I’m not sure it goes beyond a reasonable doubt. The Sharks are in cap hell, and we’ll watch Karlsson closely over the next season or so, but for now we’ll tentatively say: not a bad contract. Yet.

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What’s the worst possible salary cap situation you could create from today’s contracts?

Last​ week we tried​ to​ assemble​ a roster​ made​ up​ of some​ of the NHL’s​ best contracts. To​ add​ to the challenge​​ and avoid simply stocking up on entry-level deals, we decided to skip ahead to 2021-22 and put together the best team that would still fit under a reasonable salary cap. It turned out to be a lot of fun and at least a little bit thought-provoking, many of you weighed in with your own picks and a good time was had by all.

But more than a few readers had a suggestion: OK, now do it for the worst contracts.

My first reaction was that that sounded like fun. A cap-compliant team made up of the worst contracts in the league? That’s right up my alley.

My second reaction was that it would be easy. That was part of the appeal. Putting together the good contract roster had me looking like this guy by the end. But bad contracts? There are a ton of those! Every team has at least a few. This would be a breeze. I was in.

I got started. And then I began to actually think things through. And I realized what I had gotten myself into.

Here’s the thing: Anyone can do a simple list of the worst contracts in the NHL and lots of people have. But we’re talking about a roster of terrible NHL contracts that still fits under the salary cap, meaning we’ll have a hard time squeezing some of the worst deals in without having to fill out the roster with “bad” deals that somehow also don’t cost much.

That doesn’t just add several layers of difficulty, it barely even makes sense. It’s like putting together the best offensive team that won’t score more than 300 goals. What are we even doing here?

Luckily, “barely even makes sense” has never stopped me before. Let’s do this. Let’s build the worst possible NHL team that fits under the current cap. Or more specifically, let’s build the worst salary cap situation that would be possible in today’s NHL.

A few quick ground rules:

• This is a roster for this season, using this season’s cap and this season’s contracts. Unlike last week’s piece, there’s no reason to jump ahead to 2021-22 here. This is all for 2018-19, using the current cap of $79.5 million. And as with last week, all we care about here is cap hit; actual dollars paid out don’t matter to us.
• We’re not using any contracts that are dead money because of players that are on LTIR or whose careers are likely over. No David Clarksons, or Nathan Hortons or Marian Hossas on this team. Other than that, assume all active players are healthy – we’re not penalizing players for being injured here.
• We can’t save cap space by burying deals in the AHL, a rule that will apply to any deals that actually are buried in the AHL. We also don’t benefit from any retained salary from previous trades. We’re paying full sticker price on everything.
• We’re trying to build the worst cap situation possible, so term matters. Long deals are worse than short ones. Which means that for the purpose of our team, they’re better. Because they’re worse. You get what I’m saying.

This idea is so dumb. I love it. Let’s get to work.

(All salary info comes from CapFriendly.com. Stats for this season do not include last night’s games.)

But first, a word about “bad” contracts

It always feels a little weird to write about good and bad contracts and to realize that we always default to seeing those deals from the team’s perspective. A guy who makes too much money is considered “bad,” while a guy who makes less than he deserves goes in the “good” column.

On a certain level that makes sense. We’re fans, and ultimately the point of being a fan is to root for teams collectively, not individual players. This is a hard cap league now, meaning salaries matter. But it still feels strange to look at an underpaid player as always being a good thing, even when the difference might just be going straight into some billionaire owner’s yacht fund. And it’s especially strange to think that someone wanting to make as much money as they can has made a mistake when all of us feel the same way about our own jobs.

Let’s be clear: Every one of the guys we’re going to list in today’s piece earned his contract. They’re among the best few hundred hockey players in the world, playing in a league that generates billions in revenue based on people wanting to watch them play. Not one of them held anybody hostage, and each of them ultimately ended up signing an offer that their team put in front of them. If those turned out to be bad contracts, it’s only because their teams screwed up.

We are also going to screw up, although in our case we can at least claim to be doing it on purpose. Let’s do this. Who wants to make some capologists cry?

Goaltenders

Part of what makes this whole exercise so ridiculous is that we won’t be able to fit any of the league’s monster contracts onto the roster because they’d eat up too much space. In theory, there could be deals that are so bad that they can’t fit on our all-bad roster because they don’t leave room for anyone else.

For example, let’s look at Carey Price. His $10.5-million extension runs for another seven years after this one, even as he works through a second straight disappointing season. That one is tempting, and I tried to figure out a way to work it in. But I can’t. You just can’t build a truly terrible cap team when you’re spending that much on your starting goalie. (What that might say about building an actual Cup contender around a $10.5-million goaltender is an exercise left to the reader.)

But once you get past Price on the goaltender’s list, you find something a little surprising: There aren’t all that many goaltender deals that seem awful. There are certainly some questionable ones, but compared to the abject disasters we’re going to see at the other positions, NHL GMs seem to be showing getting smarter when it comes to choosing the men inside the crease.

A few deals do jump out as contenders for our team. Mike Smith ($5.67 million) and Semyon Varlamov ($5.9 million) are making more than you’d like, but both of those deals expire this year. Craig Anderson has another year left at $4.75 million, and that deal doesn’t look great, but you could live with it if he’s healthy and playing like he did earlier this year. Henrik Lundqvist at $8.5 million through 2021 has the potential to get ugly, but isn’t quite there yet.

Two familiar names almost make the cut. Roberto Luongo still has three more years at $5.33 million, and yes that deal still “sucks” even though he was really good last year. And then there’s Luongo’s old pal Cory Schneider, who’s got the Devils on the hook for three more years at $6 million. That one looks awful, which makes it awfully tempting for our roster.

But in the end, I’m going to save a little cap space while still grabbing a starter with one of the league’s more regrettable deals: Carolina’s Scott Darling at $4.15 million through 2021. Schneider has at least been a top goaltender in the NHL, even if it feels like a long time ago. Darling had never been a full-time starter when the Hurricanes gambled on him, and while it may have been worth rolling the dice at the time, it didn’t work. He’s been a great story, and is working to get his career back on track in the AHL right now. It’s still possible that we see him succeed in the NHL someday, but it seems unlikely to be in Carolina.

We’ll back him up with another goalie who’s currently in the AHL: Ottawa’s Mike Condon at $2.4 million. He’s signed through next year and is currently battling a hip injury in the minors. That leaves us with over $6 million in cap space spent on multi-year deals to goaltenders that aren’t actually in the NHL right now, which is way too much while also leaving plenty of room that we’re definitely going to need. Not a bad start.

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What’s the best team you can build in 2021-22 using existing contracts?

From​ time to time,​ readers​ will​ send​ me​ story​ ideas. Some​ are good, some​ not so much,​ but​ they’re always appreciated.​​ Every now and then someone will come up with something that is just the right mix of weird and fun and it turns into something cool.

But by far, there’s one idea that gets suggested the most: What’s the best cap-compliant roster you could build using all of today’s contracts?

It’s a neat idea, and we’ve seen it done well in other sports. But it never quite works in the NHL, because you just wind up with a roster stacked with entry-level deals. In an era where players (especially forwards) peak so quickly, those first contracts often represent such outrageous bargains that they make the exercise too easy. Let me start with Auston Matthews, Mikko Rantanen, Patrik Laine, Elias Pettersson and Brayden Point all at $900,000 or so, and I can stack the rest of the roster with pretty much whoever I want. Heck, give them all the bonuses too, they’re still dirt cheap. There’s no challenge to it.

You could get around that by limiting how many entry-level deals you could use. But today, let’s try something a little more challenging. We’re going to see if we can make the best cap-compliant roster that we can by using just existing contracts. But instead of building that team for this year, we’re going to try to do it for 2021-22.

Why 2021-22? The first reason is that it’s three years away, which means we lose access to all of those entry-level deals. Matthews, Rantanen and friends will all be on their second deals and making just slightly more than they are right now and the Jack Hughes cohort isn’t in the league yet so we can’t use them either. Three years also has the benefit of not being so far away that we’re just guessing about who’ll still be good by then. And there are more players than you’d think who already have contracts that reach into the 2021-22 season – 165 as of today according to Cap Friendly, including many of the league’s best players.

The idea comes with a couple of hurdles. The first is that we’ll probably have a new CBA by 2021-22, meaning there’s a chance that the cap system or HRR split could work differently by then. And even if we assume that nothing important will change, we don’t actually know what the salary cap is going to be by then.

That second problem is easy enough to solve by just picking a number that seems reasonable. Let’s go with $90 million, which would represent an increase of just over $10 million from where we are right now. The cap went up $8.1 million over the last three years, so mix in a little inflation and $90 million seems about right for 2021-22.

That leaves us with 165 players to choose from and a $90 million cap to work with to put together a 2021-22 roster that fits under the cap and looks like a Cup contender. How hard could that be? Spoiler: Harder than you might think …

(All salary information in this piece comes from CapFriendly.com. Also, all values listed are a player’s cap hit; we don’t care about the actual dollars due on the contract.)

Goaltenders

They say that you should build from the net out, so we’ll follow that advice. But when we do, we run into our first problem almost immediately. Of those 165 players signed through 2022, only nine are goaltenders. And none of them look like major bargains.

When you think about it, that makes sense. There’s more supply than demand for goaltending these days, so teams aren’t making long-term commitments to guys unless they think they’re foundational pieces. Mix in deals like Henrik Lundqvist, Frederik Andersen and Tuukka Rask that all expire the year before our 2021-22 season, and it’s no surprise that the pickings are slim.

But it’s a problem for our roster because we’re going to be spending way more on goaltending than we’d like. Even if we went with the two most inexpensive options we can find, Ben Bishop and Roberto Luongo, we’re still paying over $10 million for a position where it’s often smart to go as cheap as possible. And even Luongo can’t realistically be a pick for three years down the road since he’ll be 42 years old by then.

Instead, we’ll hand the starting job to one of the few guys on the list who looks like he could be a bargain: Anaheim’s John Gibson at $6.4 million. He’s performing at a Vezina or even Hart Trophy level these days, and while that doesn’t guarantee anything about how he’ll be playing in three years (or even three weeks), we’ll take our chances.

The other option here would have been Winnipeg’s Connor Hellebuyck at $6.166 million. He was great last year but has looked pretty ordinary this season. Hellebuyck should be fine, but I prefer Gibson enough to spend a few extra bucks. Ideally, we’d pick both guys, but $12.5 million will be too much to spend on goaltending, so we have to make a call here.

For the backup spot, we’ll go with Ben Bishop at $4.917 million, mainly because he’s the cheapest option available. Do I feel good about this pick? No, I do not – he’ll be turning 35 in 2021-22, and he’s a big guy who’s had hip problems. There’s a good chance he’s not an effective goaltender in three years’ time and we just wasted a big chunk of our cap on a guy who’ll be on LTIR or a buyout target. We’re two picks into this thing and I’m already angry.

But really, what other choice do we have? Carey Price at $10.5 million? No thanks. Cory Schneider at $6 million? Not a chance. Marc-Andre Fleury at $7 million? Maybe, but he’ll turn 37 during the 2021-22 season. Jonathan Quick ($5.8 million) and Martin Jones ($5.75 million) are at least worth considering, but we’re going to need every penny we can scrounge to fill out the rest of the roster.

That means it’s Gibson and Bishop, at a total cost of over $11 million. That’s pricey. Let’s see if we can claw back some of that space on the blueline.

Cap space spent so far: $11.317 million on two players, an average of $5.66 million each. We have $78.683 million left for 18 roster spots, an average of just over $4.37 million per player.

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Other ways NHL teams are watching the bottom line

The Devils' new fourth line
winger looked vaguely familiar.

While the action on the ice so far has been entertaining, most of the headlines generated by the NHL's opening week have come from off the ice. And thanks to the new reality of a salary cap world, they've been all about the bottom line.

The Toronto Maple Leafs sent defenceman Jeff Finger down to the AHL, where he'll have a chance to line up against other big money demotions like Sheldon Souray and Wade Redden. Meanwhile, the New Jersey Devils weren't even able to ice a full lineup for two games because they couldn't afford to call up players due to the salary cap.

While those stories made headlines, they weren't isolated incidents. Whether it's cap concerns or just old-fashioned penny pinching, everyone seems to have an eye on the balance sheet these days. And that's left many teams around the league scrambling to reduce costs any way they could in recent months.

Here's a few examples of ways that teams around the league have been cutting budgets leading up to the season.

Anaheim Ducks - Would like to follow in the footsteps of other teams by assigning NHL-calibre defencemen to the AHL. (Plan currently on hold pending acquisition of an NHL-calibre defenceman.)

Montreal Canadiens - Since the cost of repairing the damage to arena and surrounding areas resulting from riots after post-season wins are exorbitant, determine which player was solely responsible for those victories and trade him.

Washington Capitals - Could try to offset increased spending by scheduling additional games to create extra revenue; investigate whether its possible to maybe play a few dates in May some year.

Colorado Avalanche - Carefully ensure that team will not exceed the league's $59 million salary cap by making sure not to sign any players to $20 million contracts

Toronto Maple Leafs - Try to find some way to avoid paying those ridiculous entry level contracts to first round draft picks for a few years.

New Jersey Devils - Lay off the guy in charge of managing the salary cap, apparently.

Calgary Flames - Due to outrageous costs involved in heating an arena during the winter, see if the league will let us play a game outdoors this year.

Buffalo Sabres - Call up the cyborg manufacturing plant that created Tyler Myers and ask them to use cheaper materials for this year's model.

Edmonton Oilers - Experiment with some radical new strategy we haven't tried in years, like winning.

Detroit Red Wings - Reduce medical expenses by only targeting free agents who already qualify for coverage under Medicare.

New York Rangers - Conduct a thorough examination of front office spending, such as figuring out why the guy who empties the wastebaskets was given a $3 million dollar contract from Glen Sather.

Pittsburgh Penguins - Cut back spending on unnecessary luxuries, such as competent wingers.

Phoenix Coyotes - Reduce IT costs by seeing if we can't find an owner who could get us some sort of discount on our Blackberries.

Atlanta Thrashers - Save $2.4 million in cap space by walking away from any arbitration awards given to future Rocket Richard Trophy winners.

Los Angeles Kings - Cut down on pre-game costs by having the national anthem performed by the first homeless guy we can find who has his own guitar.

Philadelphia Flyers - Invite many of the best and brightest financial advisors from around the country to a team-sponsored symposium; lock the doors and have Chris Pronger steal all their lunch money.

Ottawa Senators - Keep player compensation to reasonable levels by only offering incentive bonuses that are unreachable, such as for winning the Vezina.

New York Islanders - Fire that guy who entertains fans during breaks by playing the slide trombone; ask players to start miming it instead.

Maple Leaf salary fun facts

Here's a couple of loose ends from last week's Mid-Season Value Ranking post. While putting the post together, I did some research into the Leafs' current contract and salary cap commitments. I learned a couple of things that I found interesting.

Fun fact #1: The Leafs highest paid forward is Jason Blake, thanks to his Contract of Eternal Damnation™. Next on the list is recent FA signing Nik Hagman. Do you know which Leaf forward is their third highest paid?

No, not Antropov. No, not Poni. Not even Stempy. Give up? It's this guy.

Fun fact #2: Unlike many teams, the Leafs don't have much in the way of long-term contracts. In fact, as of today the team only has a cap commitment to one player beyond 2012. Can you name him? Answer: this guy.

Oh, and on a completely unrelated note, this.