Written by Erling Lefsrud with Darnell Holt
A long time ago, in this galaxy, on this planet even, the job of an NHL GM was to do whatever you wanted. You paid the players you wanted an unknown, arbitrary amount of money and hoped nonchalantly that they held up to expectations. If they did, wonderful. If they didn’t, you just swung by the local supermarket and picked up another NHL player, not wasting any thought on what you paid him. It was a lawless time. GMs were known to eat with their elbows on the table, track mud throughout the house, and to talk loudly during professional drama productions.
Now obviously none of that is true, but in 2005, after the lockout ended, the job of a GM became far more interesting. The introduction of the salary cap made it so that small market teams could compete with large market teams who were willing to spend a lot of money, but it also meant that every GM had limited funds and overvaluing a player was a costly mistake. People now attempt to give players an accurate monetary valuation and since the most concrete evidence we have for the quality of a player is goals and assists, that is the standard used for determining a players monetary value. A general rule of thumb has emerged: $100,000 for every point a player records.
How to measure a player’s monetary value
Extrapolating from that idea leads to evaluating a player on the entirety of their contract. A player signed at $3M for five years makes $15M in that time and, following the $100 grand rule, is expected to tally 150 points in that time. I’ll be the first to say that evaluating a player solely based on their point total does not paint an accurate picture of that player. Anyone who knows hockey knows that a player brings “intangibles” to the table, things that the stats just don’t capture. Unfortunately, as the name implies, they cannot be quantified, so until we create better stats, we have to look at point totals. Here is a look at the some of the over and under-valued players in the NHL.
Note that I am not considering the entry-level contracts. A huge portion of the top players in this ranking are on entry-level contracts because, since they can’t be payed more than $950,000 a year, they are not being properly compensated for what they bring to the team. For that reason, it is not really fair to include them in the same group as players on standard contracts.
The best and the worst
Here are the ten best standard contracts over 50 games played ranked by dollars/point:
| Rank | Name | Cap Hit | dollars/point | dollars/goal |
| 1 | Tommy Novak | $800,000 | $21,052 | $57,142 |
| 2 | Jonathan Drouin | $825,000 | $21,153 | $68,750 |
| 3 | Stefan Noesen | $762,500 | $23,106 | $54,464 |
| 4 | Brandon Hagel | $1,500,000 | $24,193 | $65,217 |
| 5 | James Van Riemsdyk | $1,000,000 | $26,315 | $90,909 |
| 6 | Yegor Chinakhov | $800,000 | $27,586 | $50,000 |
| 7 | Darren Raddysh | $762,500 | $28,240 | $152,500 |
| 8 | Erik Gustaffson | $825,000 | $28,448 | $137,500 |
| 9 | Michael Carcone | $775,000 | $28,703 | $40,789 |
| 10 | Danton Heinen | $775,000 | $28,703 | $59,615 |
The ten worst:
| Rank | Name | Cap Hit | dollars/point | dollars/goal |
| 1 | Darnell Nurse | $9,250,000 | $402,173 | $1,156,250 |
| 2 | Barclay Goodrow | $3,641,667 | $404,629 | $3,641,667 |
| 3 | Marco Scandella | $3,275,000 | $409,375 | $1,637,500 |
| 4 | Nicolas Deslauriers | $1,750,000 | $437,500 | $1,750,000 |
| 5 | Ilya Lyubushkin | $2,750,000 | $458,333 | has no goals |
| 6 | Jamie Oleksiak | $4,600,000 | $460,000 | $2,300,000 |
| 7 | Matt Grzelcyk | $3,687,500 | $460,937 | $1,843,749 |
| 8 | Erik Cernak | $5,200,000 | $520,000 | $5,200,000 |
| 9 | Nate Schmidt | $5,950,000 | $540,909 | $2,975,000 |
| 10 | Erik Johnson | $3,250,000 | $1,083,333 | $1,083,333 |
NOTE: these are the current dollar per point totals, since this year is not finished, these can only get lower, and therefore better, by the end of the season. The average dollars/point across all the standard contracts over 50 games played in the whole league is $144,557, fairly close to that $100,000/point mark.
I know that all you Oilers fans reading this article have been frantically scrolling through the best list to find Zach Hyman’s name, I expected it to be on there as well. As it turns out he is ranked 106th on this list, behind fellow Oilers Ryan McLeod, Derek Ryan, Warren Foegele, Sam Carrick, and Evan Bouchard who sits at an impressive $60,337 per point. While scanning this list though you probably noticed that none of the top ten players are being paid more than $ 1.5Mand only one over $1M. A player making league minimum doesn’t have to score many points to have an impressive dollars/point rate. Someone like Connor Mcdavid on the other hand needs to score 125 points just to get to that old $100,000 per point adage.
One thing to note about the ten worst contracts is that the opposite of the best contracts doesn’t hold true—they are not entirely large cap hits. In fact, they are mostly mid to low range cap hits.
Contracts similar to Hyman
I originally started writing this article in order to see how impressive of signing Hyman was. So here is where he really shines. These are the best 10 contracts similar in cap hit to Hyman, now ranked by dollars per goal:
| Rank | Name | Cap Hit | dollars/goal |
| 1 | Zach Hyman | $5,500,000 | $119,565 |
| 2 | Jonathan Marchessault | $5,000,000 | $135,135 |
| 3 | Blake Coleman | $4,900,000 | $175,000 |
| 4 | Chris Kreider | $6,500,000 | $196,969 |
| 5 | Brandon Saad | $4,500,000 | $225,000 |
| 6 | Brad Marchand | $6,125,000 | $226,851 |
| 7 | Kyle Palmieri | $5,000,000 | $238,095 |
| 8 | Evander Kane | $5,125,000 | $244,047 |
| 9 | Vladimir Tarasenko | $5,000,000 | $263,157 |
| 10 | Ryan Nugent-Hopkins | $5,125,000 | $320,312 |
Something even more impressive is looking at the entire Hyman contract and how he stacks up so far. Try to keep up with all the numbers here. Hyman is in the third year of a seven-year, $5.5M contract. By the end of that contract he will have been paid $38.5M, by the 100 grand rule he is expected to score 385 points in that time, or 55 points per year. Hyman is currently on pace for 82 points this season and if you use that total, will have 219 points so far with the Oilers at the end of this season. He will have created $21.9M in value while only being paid $16.5M, a net positive value of $5.4M. At this rate, by the end of his contract he will have created a net positive value of $13.7’M. In other words, it’s time Ken Holland had Zach Hyman over for dinner.
Stats accurate as of March 19 from CapFriendly.com and NHL.com
Photo by Curtis Comeau/Icon Sportswire
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