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I’m surfing through some salary information at the moment and came across a couple of interesting things. The two teams that spent the most money on salary this year in the NHL? Philadelphia and Chicago. This is actual dollars, not cap hits. The Hawks spent $64.5MM - in a league with a $56.8MM cap and Philly spent $62MM.

At the other end of the spectrum, the Islanders spent only $38MM, plus whatever bonuses Tavares hit. I’d think that he, at most, hit his “A” schedule bonuses of $850K. The three hockey players who took the most money out of the Islanders this year? Rick DiPietro, Mark Streit and Alexei Yashin. Ouch. You’d have to think that Sheldon Souray might be attractive to them, because you can pay him less than his cap hit. In a related story, the Islanders are picking fifth in the draft.

I’ve got escrow on the mind at the moment - I’m working on something longer that talks about the NHLPA and escrow - but if I endured the waking hell that must be playing for the New York Islanders (all forms of waking hell are relative, obviously), it would drive me completely insane that I was paying part of my salary back to the NHL so that the Blackhawks and Flyers can spend far more money than they’re ostensibly permitted to. At the very least, I’d hope that the Hawks would reward me with a Stanley Cup ring - if they’re giving them out to people who carefully built explosives set for July 1 into the foundation of the Hawks, they really ought to give them to people who’ve done nothing to hurt them and actually took money from their own pockets to pay the league back for the Hawks’ and Flyers’ profligacy.

One of the (many) things that drives me nuts about the Oilers’ philosophy is their seeming inability to mesh a number of different approaches to acquiring talent. They’re either in build through free agency/big trade mode or they’re in build through the draft mode. There’s a cost to this singlemindedness and rigid adherence to some sort of a grand plan, as it prevents you from taking advantage of opportunities that might crop up. Lowe made the following comments the other day:

“We’ve got to get back to what we did for a lot of years,” said Lowe, who was promoted in 2008 after eight seasons as general manager. “We’ve got to get back to our basic principles of drafting and development, get out of the free agent business.”

…

“It just seems to be in recent NHL history that the only way you become a contender is you have to go to the back of the bus for a while and regroup,” Lowe said. “We had a pile of injuries this year to key players and in some respects — having been at this for 10 years now — it’s a blessing in disguise.

“It’s almost like something hit us in the side of the head and said, ‘OK, if you guys can’t figure this out yourself, then we’re going to do it for you.’”

This, along with quotes from Steve Tambellini, have kind of suggested to me that the Oilers are out of the business of trying to plug holes on the team by acquiring top of the roster players from other teams. There seems to be a fair amount of support for this from people who were disappointed when Nikolai Khabibulin, Dustin Penner and Sheldon Souray didn’t put the Oilers over the top. The ill-fated wooing of Dany Heatley and unfortunate Michael Nylander incident, along with a lot of people rejecting the Oilers’ money along the way, hasn’t done much to convince fans of the Oilers of the value in trying to acquire players this way.

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This is a pretty cool story:

Winter, with help from mathematical advisers, has determined exactly how many points a contending team needs from its top-six forward group and top-four defencemen, and the save percentage required from a goalie to become a 100-point team.

For example, if all thresholds are met from the defence and goalies, a team that gets at least 143 goals from its top six forwards will record 100 points. According to Winter, that number has stayed true every year since the lockout. He has calculations like that for every position.

“I will make arguments to teams that they need a little more up front, that they need X, Y or Z and the models prove it out,” he said. “It’s a model we’ve developed using a little bit of Moneyball in hockey.”

When it came time to narrow down Hossa’s possible destinations, there were only four teams that matched the criteria.

Personally, if I ran a hockey team and Ritch Winter told me he’d developed a model that showed I just needed a little bit more of X, Y or Z and that he happened to represent X, Y or Z, I’d be pretty skeptical. At the same time, this is the sort of modelling that teams should be doing because, done properly, it lets them break down their team and understand where they’re deficient. This lets them target their spending a bit better, avoiding moves that cost a lot and add little value because of where the team’s strengths already lie.

It’s an interesting value addition as an agent for a client though. Salaries in the NHL are, increasingly, easy enough to negotiate. It’s hard for me to understand what value agents add that a player couldn’t get by just hiring a lawyer on an hourly basis. If Winter really does have a model - and I’m a bit doubtful of some of the other stuff in the story - well, it’s a good reason to pick him over a different agent.

I’m curious what the teams were - I’d guess Pittsburgh, Washington, San Jose and Chicago, assuming that Detroit was out for financial reasons. I don’t know that you really need a model for that but still interesting.

I’m doing a series of playoff previews with Gabe Desjardins, Sunny Mehta and Olivier Bouchard. You may notice that the playoffs have already started but, due to a series of events beyond my control, I’m posting my previews over the weekend. C’est la vie (what with a guy who lives in the bayou, Desjardins and Olivier, I assume I need to bring some french.)

You have to feel for Predators’ fans. This is their fifth appearance in the Stanley Cup playoffs and, for the fifth time in a row, they’ve gotten stuck facing a powerhouse in the first round. The Preds’ playoff history consists of a pair of 4-2 series losses to the Red Wings and a pair of 4-1 series losses to the Sharks. This time will be different in that it is the Blackhawks on the other side of the ice but (in all likelihood) the same in that at the end of the day, the Preds are going to suffer a swift elimination.

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From Tim Sassone at the Chicago Daily Herald:

Blackhawks GM Dale Tallon admitted Wednesday the team made a mistake getting qualifying contract offers to his restricted free agents on time but claimed the goof did not force them to overpay for Kris Versteeg and Cam Barker.

Versteeg and Barker signed three-year, $9.25 million contract extensions after earning $984,000 and $490,000 last season, respectively.

“I think that we got them at fair market value,” Tallon said. “When you compare the comparables, looking at the point production of Barker and Versteeg and all the other players, those numbers are right in line with what they possibly would have gotten in arbitration. We’re happy to get them long term.”

Neither player had arbitration rights.

Even though we’re a few days into free agency and getting to the part of the summer where the news starts to slow down, there are still more than a few interesting stories out there. Two have caught my attention in particular: the Hawks’ mess with their unrestricted free agents and the Oilers’ chase of Dany Heatley.

Josh Mora of CSNChicago has an interesting story about the Blackhawks situation. The story has an interesting premise:

I was also informed by a separate source closer to the league that while clerical errors such as this are not common, they do happen more than occasionally. So clearly, because this looks worse to the general public than to those more familiar with league operations, someone is trying to embarrass Dale Tallon by letting this leak out. What are the possible scenarios and motivations for that to happen?

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Gary Bettman, March 2, 2009:

This will be our fourth consecutive year of record revenue growth and, because our attendance historically increases month by month, 2008-09 also likely will be our fourth consecutive season of record attendance.

There was a story that appeared in the Globe shortly after that quote that I picked up on in which David Shoalts estimated that the NHLPA would be paying back 13% of their salaries to the NHL this year. I ran the numbers and figured that Bettman’s comments didn’t make any sense - revenues couldn’t be that high if the players were going to be paying back 13% of their salaries. Bill Daly appears to have confirmed this in the New Jersey Star Ledger yesterday:

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