Toronto Maple Leafs: A Reminder of the Most Basic Lesson of the Analytics Era

The Toronto Maple Leafs are on the verge of something special, so they will be on the lookout for players that can improve their team at the Trade Deadline.

For the Toronto Maple Leafs that means just one thing: Adding star players.

The NHL is a salary cap league, which means that marginal gains are expensive, and teams should be concerned with mainly adding stars to their lineup.

Because there is so much parity, and so few stars, this means that the Trade Deadline is a really big deal.  Any team that adds Timo Meier or Jakob Chychrun is going to get a huge boost.  Barring other significant stars becoming available, those are really the only two guys who move the needle in any way that is significant.

And yet, I am forever reading about the Toronto Maple Leafs adding mid-range players like Luke Schenn,  Max Domi or Ivan Barbashev to the lineup.  They might as well do nothing as trade for those players.

That has prompted me to write this little reminder:

Don’t Forget the Main Lesson of the Analytics Era

The main lesson that Analytics have taught us is this:  Never waste money or assets on non-star players.  The salary cap renders all non-star players interchangeable, and makes marginal gains expensive and pointless.

Understanding that there is virtually no difference between anyone who might make the NHL and anyone who has made it but isn’t a star, is the key to salary cap success.

Of the 1000 *roughly* players (what follows is a hypothesis using easy to digest numbers not meant to be literal, but rather just to give an idea of the concept without bogging it down in specifics) in the NHL, about 100 of them are star players, as defined by how many wins a player is worth.

About 10% of NHL players are worth between one and five wins, while the other 90% are all worth between nothing and .99 wins per year.  Think of this as a guiding principle, rather than an attempt to be literal.  90% of NHL players are not valuable compared to what  a replacement player can offer, relative to their respective salaries and the team’s overall cap situation.

In the NHL, the MVP of any given year is going to be worth about five wins (give or take), while the best 100 players in the NHL are going to be worth between 1 and 5 wins.

Everyone else is interchangeable in a salary cap league.

This is why the Leafs let players such as Hyman, Kapanen, Johnson, and Mikheyev walk in free-agency.  Non-star players are not good value on their contracts.

Non Star Players Offer Little to No Value

Better to let someone else pay them, while you pay a league minimum player and try to see if he works out playing with your stars.  Meanwhile, you can pump the difference in salary into players you know will move the needle.

If there was no salary cap, it would be worth spending any amount for marginal gains.  In a cap league, you’re shooting yourself in the foot every time you give out term or money to a Domi, a  Mikeheyev or a Connor Garland.

The fact is, Connor Garland is a nice player.  But his contributions are indistinguishable from the likes of Cale Jarkrok, Pierre Engvall or Alex Kerfoot.  All four players have failed to become stars, but are more useful then a random AHL player.

The NHL salary cap puts the squeeze on these players by destroying their value.  Sure, they are helpful and add significant depth to the roster.  However, if  the Leafs could make a trade to get rid of all three for one star player who made their combined salary, and then filled out the roster with their 2 worst AHL players, they’d be a much better team.

It has been proven that the NHL is a strong link game where star players make a difference, and depth is not an issue.  Obviously you shouldn’t take this to the extreme, but generally speaking, 900 of the NHL’s non-star players could be swapped out for the 900 best players in Europe and the AHL, and no one would notice. ( I think this is what might be called a “plurality” but I could be mistaken).

Regardless of what you call it, this concept is the major thing people fail to understand when it comes to the NHL Trade Deadline, and this includes many NHL GMs.

The crucial lesson of the last ten years is that star players make you better, and non-star players who make a salary higher than the league minimum have negative value.   The Toronto Maple Leafs clearly know this, but they hedge their bets with players like Jarnkrok and Kerfoot, while a more extreme adherence to this principle would be, in my opinion,  better.

Regardless, this is why I feel 99% confident saying players like Connor Garland, Luke Schenn and Max Domi are not on their radar.