With the announcement of the rosters for the NHL’s 4 Nations Face-Off to be announced tomorrow, people are getting in their final projected rosters in an attempt to win clout about how much smarter they are than everyone else.
These predictions can be hard to make given the vast amount of talent available for the teams. While the top end players are obvious picks, the bottom half of rosters can come down to just personal preference. With no salary cap, it’s pretty easy to pick your own dream team.
But since this is an NHL tournament, what if the NHL had decided that the teams had to maintain cap compliance? After all, this isn’t necessarily a true best-on-best tournament when it is just four teams competing, so why not include a gimmick? As much as the previous NHL tournament, the 2016 World Cup, was derided for Team North America and Team Europe, in hindsight those ended up being some pretty fun teams to watch.
Adding in the cap makes it a much more interesting roster construction experiment. Do you go top heavy and fill out the roster with cheaper options, such as young players on ELCs? Do you leave out a good but overpaid player in favour of slightly worse but better value contract players?
What would $88M cap compliant rosters for the four teams look like? That averages to about $3.8M per player, definitely much lower than the average salary for any player who would be considered for these teams.
Here is what I would do if I was in the GM positions.
Team Canada
This may be the one time where Canada’s goaltending woes come in handy. Logan Thompson is having a pretty good season with the Washington Capitals making league minimum, meaning he basically makes the team by default. The question is whether to include veterans having decent seasons like Cam Talbot and Marc-Andre Fleury making a still fairly small $2.5M, or to leave the starting job to Thompson and then rely on other goalies making less than a million who have shown glimpses in the past, such as Joel Hofer. With cap constraints and the fact that there is only one crease, I decided to take the risk on leaning on Thompson and having career backup Eric Comrie as the third goalie. In the end, is this goaltending really any worse than the projected Hill, Jordan Binnington, and Talbot trio?
In order to have the best Canadian players in Connor McDavid, Nathan MacKinnon, Sidney Crosby, and Cale Makar on the roster, we had to go with some younger and riskier picks for the rest of the roster.
I decided to go with some hot hand players who otherwise likely don’t sniff Team Canada. Dylan Strome is fifth in league scoring, and second amongst Canadians, so even at a $5M salary the value is still there. Matt Duchene has continued his renaissance in Dallas, and at $3M he is a bargain. Jake Walman is having a career season, and although his $3.4M might be a bit high, I figured he is still the best bang for the buck at that third defence position.
We had to have a bit of a youth movement, with Connor Bedard, Macklin Celebrini, Dylan Guenther, Logan Stankoven, Brandt Clarke, and Ryker Evans all making the team thanks to those sweet, sweet ELC contracts.
Because of all these unknowns, I decided we needed to stick with three other veteran projected defencemen to make the team in Josh Morrissey, Shea Theodore, and Noah Dobson. A solid top-four in addition to the big three forwards up front should hopefully be enough to insulate the inexperience elsewhere on the roster.
Unfortunately, many, many of Canada’s best players were cap casualties, but I think this team has the potential to get hot and make a run.
Team USA
Goaltending is noted to be Team USA’s strength at this year’s tournament, but the top goalies are all quite expensive. However, the goaltending depth is still there even at the lower salary levels, as Joey Daccord, Dustin Wolf, and Joseph Woll are all having quite good seasons. So I took the risk of leaving off presumed starter and Vezina Trophy front runner Connor Hellebuyck, given that these three combined are not even half his cap hit.
Like Team Canada, this is another top heavy roster that required looking for value contracts to fill it out. You can’t leave off Auston Matthews, even with his league leading $13.25M cap hit, and Jack Eichel is having a great season at 36 points in 25 games, just two off the league lead.
Because of their reasonable contracts (relatively speaking), we are able to include four more superstar players making over $7M, a luxury that Canada could not afford.
While Canada has six players currently still on their ELC, USA gets by with four. Granted, one of those is Brock Faber, whose eight-year deal paying him $8.5M a year doesn’t kick in until next year.
Because of the money issue, I had to cut Adam Fox for John Carlson, saving an extra $1.5M in space. Carlson is having a pretty good year though, so it’s probably not much of a downgrade.
Alex Tuch, Jack Roslovic, and Connor Garland are all having good starts to their year (Roslovic has already tied the second most goals he’s ever had in a season), and help complement the star forwards.
Stefan Noesen is similarly off to an extremely hot start point wise, and I think having him and Mason Appleton makes a pretty good value third line pairing.
The fourth line is a youth line, much like what we have for bottom-six for Canada, and while not young, Eric Robinson has been performing well for the Hurricanes and looks like he could slot in throughout the lineup in case of emergency.
It was a difficult decision to leave off Matthew Tkachuk, but again at $9.5M his salary was just a bit too high to be able to fit in. Same for Brady’s contract. But at least we get all three Hughes’ brothers?
Team Finland
This may have been the hardest team to make. Finland has the least amount of NHL players of the four teams, so there weren’t as many “cheap” options, despite the fact that a majority of the Finnish players’ contracts are actually fairly reasonable in NHL terms. The biggest reason for this is the lack of ELC contracts that USA and Canada have.
With his slow start, I was almost tempted to leave off Roope Hintz and be able to have two NHL regulars in his place, such as Mikael Granlund and Mattias Maccielli, but at the end of the day you have to take a player like Hintz no matter what.
An injury to Jani Hakanpaa has really thrown a wrench into things, as his $1.47M cap hit was fairly reasonable, and also because there are no other right handed defencemen. I’ve replaced him with Juuso Valimaki instead of Olli Maata, if only because Valimaki is $1M cheaper. That allows us to actually have a 13th forward. But with Kasperi Kapanen, Jesse Puljujarvi, and Aatu Raty holding spots throughout the lineup, the depth is not there and this is probably the weakest team under these rules. Jusse Saros will have his work cut out for him.
Team Sweden
Sweden’s great defence corps is their undoing in this exercise. They have two $11M men, and then ten defencemen over $4M.
I decided to choose Rasmus Dahlin over Erik Karlsson, and then go cheap on the right side, hoping that a strong left side can help cover for youngsters Adam Boqvist and Simon Edvinsson. Albert Johansson is the final defenceman solely because of his contract.
Up front, I again only opted for one $11M forward in William Nylander. I also decided to go with Lucas Raymond over Mika Zibanejad and Filip Forsberg as an $8M player. That extra $500K allowed us to be able to fit in a fairly solid centre corps of Adrian Kempe, Gustav Nyquist, Joel Eriksson Ek, and Marcus Johansson. Younger players will again be counted on up front, with William Eklund, Simon Holmstrom, and Leo Carlsson getting a chance.
While Mattias Ekholm doesn’t make the team, there is still one Edmonton Oiler here in Mattias Janmark. Finally, we have Jesper Boqvist as the extra forward because of his cheap contract, and also because why not have yet another brother duo where we can?
In goal, contracts mean that the likely two top goalies for Sweden in Jacob Markstrom and Linus Ullmark are not there anymore, but Filip Gustavsson appears to have bounced back from a subpar last year, so hopefully there isn’t any concern there.
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So those are some potential cap compliant rosters…I think I can speak for everyone when I say this was a bad idea and it would not be that entertaining to watch a tournament like this. But still, I’m sure that I have angered some people based on these picks, so please go ahead and comment on who I should have picked/left off, or feel free to try to make your own teams and see just how hard this is.
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