Nik
Active member
https://twitter.com/FriedgeHNIC/status/1178101842082959361
https://twitter.com/FriedgeHNIC/status/1178102450714226688
https://twitter.com/FriedgeHNIC/status/1178102450714226688
Kyle Connor signs 7 year deal in WPG, 7.143 AAV
- Thread starter Nik
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Frank E
Well-known member
I don't know until you tell me the %/point...
Nik
Active member
Frank E said:
I'll do you one better. With Connor at 7.143 here's all of the RFA forwards who merited their own thread here:
Point: .090
Tkachuk: .111
Boeser: .129
Rantanen: .130
Connor: .135
Konecny: .138
Marner: .142
Laine: .166
(Nylander, fwiw, was at .143)
So the real outliers are Laine and Point which make sense. Point because of the Tampa thing, Laine because he is being paid more like the player he was in his first two years. The Tkachuk deal is weird but I figure that's about his big jump in scoring in year three.
So, all in all, players more or less got paid according to their offensive production. Nothing particularly surprising all things considered.
princedpw
Well-known member
Nik the Trik said:
Let?s ignore Point. (Random question: is it points in the final season before the contract? Last two seasons?)
The spread according to this data is .111 to .166.
.166/.111 approx= 1.5
So one team is paying 50% more per point than another?
If that?s right, my conclusion would be that %/point metric doesn?t explain the data very well and isn?t as predictive enough on its own to be a useful metric. An 8 million contract on the low end might rise to a 12 million on the high end.
Nik
Active member
princedpw said:
Ignoring Point, 5 of the 7 are within a .013 spread of each other and are generally within the range of a lot of other contracts signed in the cap era.
With regards to Tkachuk and Laine's deals I feel like I pretty clearly explain what I think is going on there and why they fall outside of the norms. Laine in particular and his very unusual pattern of having a significantly worse third year than his first two effectively explains the discrepancy there because if you look at his %/point for the average of his first three years he's at .136 or right in with the rest of them(Tkachuk would be at .148 also). So if I had to guess it's that Winnipeg and Laine think last year was not representative of who he was.
Because that's the thing. I'm not claiming that the human element isn't here. Some teams will negotiate more advantageous deals for themselves, others won't. Some will highly value a player's less tangible attributes, some might not. Conversely, some players may lean more towards "I'll take a lower deal to give the team more space" and some may not. Some may press their leverage as much as they can for a high salary, some may prize stability more. That's why in every year there will be a spread.
I appreciate that some of you like things like these Evolving Wild projections or similar all-encompassing metrics so you don't actually have to think for yourselves but I'm not claiming this as a one stop shop to explain all NHL contracts. Just that there's a general range that most contracts will fit into that's largely based on the most readily available and traditionally valued statistic we have.
If a player falls outside of that pattern it raises interesting questions about why or how that might have happened which bear examination which, personally, I feel is probably better for getting a feel for the economics of the game than shrieking "OMG IT DIDN'T MATCH MY METRIC! OVERPAID! OVERPAID!!!! GM IS BAD AT HIS JOB!!!!"
Heroic Shrimp
Active member
Nik the Trik said:
While I don't disagree with your general point, I'd also observe that comparing the value of bridge deals to long-term deals is very much apples to oranges.
OldTimeHockey
Well-known member
Heroic Shrimp said:
That's fine. Tell that to everyone using Laine's deal to somehow make Marner's deal look bad.
Nik
Active member
Heroic Shrimp said:
Sure, that's true to an extent. When we look at the Marner deal vs. the Tkachuk or Point deals obviously some of the discrepancy there is going to be about the term of the deal(although, with that said, OTH is also right that those deals were used to beat up on Dubas for the Marner deal so it's not unreasonable to think of them as relevant to the ongoing conversation)
However I think there are two points to be made there:
1. I think in general the idea of the bridge contract has changed recently. I think to some extent it used to be about a young player having achieved a high level of play and wanting a big contract but a team being hesitant to commit long term on the basis of one big season. Now I think it's generally about teams wanting to commit to long term deals but players being hesitant to lock themselves into a salary for a long term.
2. I think it's important to remember that while industry trends are important factors they're not absolutes. It wasn't too long ago that thinking was that a young player had to earn a long term deal and that the longer the deal was the AAV might drop because the team was guaranteeing extra money. Obviously with the low risk of injury and the rising cap, players are now looking at those extra years as prime earning years and things have shifted to longer deals needing higher AAVs to justify them not reaching free agency sooner.
With that said though, it doesn't mean that no players will ever view a deal the other way or it'll never be a factor in anyone's thinking. Likewise with what I said about bridge deals, there still will be some bridge deals that hew more to the older concept of them.
This echoes back to what I was just saying about having to use our heads and dig at these deals and the whys and whatfores and not just punching them into some all purpose formula that spits out what the "right" contract is.
So, yeah, this is an example of how I think your phrase should be used. It is like comparing apples and oranges and not, say, apples and old Soviet missile silos.
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