Let’s Talk Salary Cap

The salary cap remains a big gray area for fans, media, and the teams themselves.

During the 2022-23 season the NHL had a $82,500,000 hard cap for each team in the league. The NHL also has a 23-man active roster limit, a $750,000 minimum salary, and a $16,500,000 maximum salary, 20% of the hard ceiling. There’s also a hard floor, in 2022-23 it was $61,000,000.

Nic Deslauriers

A players “cap hit”, the average value of a player’s contract, has become a measuring stick for players in mostly crude fashion. The Flyers are no stranger to this. Nic Deslauriers is probably the easiest example of “cap hit bias” on the current club.

There are a couple of ways to look at Deslauriers or anyone else and get a better picture of how they fit into the puzzle that is the Salary Cap.

First is to look at Deslauriers or anyone else in context of the minimum salary.

Deslauriers carries a $1,750,000 cap hit. He’d cost at least $750,000 due to the minimum. In my mind, the question becomes: is Nic Deslauriers worth $1,000,000? To me he absolutely is.

Every player on your 23-man roster is going to carry at least a $750,000 cap hit, so look beyond that.

And yes, cap gurus, I know there are circumstances where that changes, but for the average fan it’s far easier to talk in strict terms about the big AAV cap hit number so stick with me on it.

Now you might be saying, cool parlor trick to make Deslauriers look like a sound investment, but that $750,000 is going to be less significant as player cap hits go up. You’re right. You can’t ice a 23-man roster of league minimum salaries; you’d be $43,750,000 under the cap floor in 2022-23.

Basement Value

We can come up with a basement value by dividing the cap floor of $61,000,000 by 23, the active roster, for an average of $2,652,174. Deslauriers at $1,750,000 means you can spend an additional $900,000 on another roster player and attain the cap floor. For every roster player under that basement value, you can roster a player for the same amount above the basement value. Deslauriers is about $900k under the value. This means you can roster someone $900k above the basement value and maintain the average.

The next thing to look at when it comes to Salary Cap and player values is points. Most cap tracking websites will give you a cap $ per point value for individual players. I should note that I am currently talking about forwards, the defense aspect of this will come later.

To figure the average cap $ value of a point in 2022-23 I calculated the value for each of the top 10 points producing forwards in the NHL this year and then took the average of those 10 values. The cap cost of a point in 2022-23 was $71,876.

We can couple the league minimum salary with cost-per-point and get a number that tells us how close to value a player was. After all, whether you put up a point or not, the NHL minimum salary is what it is and it serves as a fair equalizer.

Nic Deslauriers carried a $1,000,000 cap value above the minimum. He produced 12 points this year, for a value of $862,512. He came up about 2 points or $135,000 short of expected. That Deslauriers comes up two points short of expectations in a measure fueled by the top 10 point producing forwards in the league says something about bias. It’s indicative of a misunderstanding of what hockey at the NHL level requires.

We can apply the same formula to the Basement Value and Deslauriers becomes more attractive and a positive player. His cap hit is significantly less than the average value. Low-cost players offer value in two ways. The first is direct production, Deslauriers’ 12 points carry a value of $862,500 cap dollars. The second is offsetting the cost of high-cost players. Especially when those high-cost players fail to be high production players.

James Van Riemsdyk

Let’s talk about another popular name this season in James Van Riemsdyk. Much of the talk around James Van Riemsdyk was that he was done wrong by the organization’s failure to move him at the deadline. What no one wants to hear is that there wasn’t any value in Van Riemsdyk. Much like the Yandle benching, people seemed upset about a best-case scenario that was divorced from on-ice realities.

We’ve previously established the value of a point in 2022-23 cap dollars was $71,876. Van Riemsdyk produced 29 points. The value of those points in cap dollars is $2,084,404. Van Riemsdyk carried a $7,000,000 cap hit in 2022-23. He seriously underproduced versus his cap number. Even when subtracting the minimum salary, Van Riemsdyk is still valued at $6,250,000 cap dollars while producing at $2,084,404. That’s a negative value of $4,165,596 cap dollars.

Why would anyone want to give up an asset for that?

In terms of points per cap dollar, Van Riemsdyk owed the Flyers roughly 58 more points on the season. Of course, Van Riemsdyk’s not an 80 point guy and there’s something to be said about teams being willing to overpay for modest production. There’s even more to say about fans justifying and shielding players from criticism when they take the overpay and underproduce.

Van Riemsdyk falls short of even a reasonable expectation like 50 points by 21 points or $1,509,396 in cap dollars.

Ceiling Value

There’s no measure that makes the cap dollars invested in Van Riemsdyk a positive. Even subtracting the Basement Value leaves you in the negative by more than $2,250,000, or 30 points. On the opposite end of the spectrum using the Ceiling Value, that is the Cap Ceiling divided by 23, Van Riemsdyk’s production still represents an overpayment of more than $1,600,000 or 20 points.

When I consider a player’s value these are the numbers that run through my head. How far off the minimum salary is that cap number? How far above or below the basement value is that cap hit? Does the player have the potential to deliver close to the points the cap dollars spent indicate? I tend not to worry too much about cap hits at or below around $3,500,000. Once we get north of that number how many players are hitting above $3,500,000 and what their production history is become immensely important.

In the coming weeks I’ll do the same for defensemen and goaltending. The salary cap remains a big gray area for fans, media, and the teams themselves. As we get closer to the new season, I’ll tackle LTIR, and we’ll start tracking players and their cap worth as we get into the season.

Anthony Chatburn is a Contributor for HW Hockey
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