Is Minnesota's Declining Contract Efficiency A Long-Term Concern?

Late July is slow in the NHL media cycle. It’s as nice outside as it gets all year. Fans, reporters, and bloggers all have better things to do than read and write about which GMs are more or less mediocre than the others. 

But if you’re a true sicko, and you must be if you’re reading this blog today, it’s a great time to rehash free-agent contracts. Teams have mostly solidified their rosters in preparation for training camp, and 99% of players who will suit up in the NHL know which sweater they’ll pull on in October. 

Every year, Dom Luszczyszyn uses this lull in the calendar to analyze every contract in the NHL. He stacks that up against his analytical model to put a dollar value on each player in the league. From there, it’s easy to subtract their contract price from their on-ice value. That number gives a pretty good projection of how much each contract helps or hurts the team that signed it. 

Luszczyszyn combines every free agent contract for each team in the league to rate how efficiently GMs have allocated their salary cap this year and in the future. This year, Minnesota slipped from 6th to 19th. 

Then Luszczyszyn uses this data to identify the top ten best and worst contracts. Matt Boldy’s contract made the list of best contracts, and yet the team’s overall cap utilization plummeted in only one year. 

That led me to a question: Is Bill Guerin about to join the other list? Could Minnesota soon have an albatross contract back on its books? 

Guerin has signed some controversial extensions in recent years. Specifically, the lengths of Frederick Gaudreau, Marcus Foligno, Ryan Hartman, and Jake Middleton’s new deals surprised fans, and they aren’t team-friendly deals for by Luszczyszyn’s numbers. 

Even still, none of these contracts are close to making the list of top-10 worst contracts in the NHL. There’s also reason for optimism with some of these numbers. The model heavily weighs last year’s performance in predicting future years, and 2023-24 saw many of Minnesota’s best team players out with injury. That can trick the model into thinking that some players, especially role players, are declining due to age. 

But the same can be said for many of the teams who joined Luszczyszyn’s contract NaughtyList. A better way to approach this problem is: What led those teams to sign negative-value contracts, and is Guerin on track to make some of the same mistakes? 

Examining the contracts on this list, a few patterns emerge. There are basically four reasons that a team overpays a player so badly that they end up on this list: 

1. Betting on a bounce-back
2. Bad environment 
3. Miscast into a role too high in the lineup
4. Strategic overpay 

NHL GMs are prone to paying players above their recent performance in hopes that they’ll regain their level of play from years ago. For example, Luszczyszyn’s list includes Sean Couturier (7th worst), Tom Wilson (3rd), and Chandler Stephenson (2nd). Wilson used to be a true throwback first-line power forward, but that physical style is taxing. It’s unlikely he’ll bounce back to his early-career form. Stephenson played at a higher level with the Vegas Golden Knights. However, on a thinner Seattle Kraken roster, it’s unlikely that he’ll regain his early-career form. And like Stephenson and Wilson, Couturier is in his 30s with a contract of six-plus years. 

If Guerin makes it onto this list, that might be the reason. The Foligno and Middleton extensions are reminiscent of Wilson’s deal in that they are extremely physical players who will likely age rapidly due to the toll their play style takes on their bodies. 

It’s noteworthy that all five of these deals (Wilson, Stephenson, Couturier, Foligno, and Middleton) were signed because they are good leaders. All four teams are rebuilding to different degrees, so we should expect a small overpayment for their locker room presence. 

The average free agent deal also provides slightly negative value to a team. Entry-level contract (ELC) or Restricted Free Agent (RFA) deals nearly always favor the team, which leads to too many dollars chasing too few Unrestricted Free Agents (UFA). However, in the case of the five deals above, they are even less efficient than expected, even considering their locker room presence. 

Team environments also meaningfully impact contract values. Bad teams overpaid Jonathan Huberdeau (worst value), Stephenson, Colton Parayko (4th-worst), and Damon Severson (5th). Hockey is a team game, so playing on flawed rosters can make some of these deals look worse than they are. 

Furthermore, these teams have a surplus of cap space because they roster fewer high-end players. They have the same salary cap as the other NHL teams, and they have to spend it somewhere. That makes their GMs desperate enough to get talent into the building that they will overpay free agents. It’s a vicious cycle that leads to more losing. Fortunately, Guerin seems to have a competitive roster prepared for now and the future. 

Defensemen also tend to be the victim of poor roster management when they are miscast too high in the lineup. Sometimes, teams sign a free-agent defenseman to play a shutdown role against the world’s best players, and they aren’t quite able to keep up. That’s the case for both Seth Jones (8th-worst value) and Darnell Nurse (9th). Seth Jones illustrates this point best. 

When Jones played in Columbus, he put up elite defensive numbers. However, he was able to lean on his teammates more. The Columbus Blue Jackets had a deep top-four defensemen, and they shared the workload. When the Chicago Blackhawks signed Jones, they hoped he could continue his elite production under a heavy workload. Luszczyszyn notes that his model is more favorable to Jones after adjusting for the quality of teammates and competition, but Jones still rates poorly. To me, that indicates he can’t hang in his current role in Chicago. 

Nurse and Jones share another interesting issue: Both are being paid like franchise defensemen rather than top-pairing defensemen. In Luszczyszyn’s breakdown of player value, note the stark difference between a team’s No. 1, No. 3, and No. 5 defensemen. The difference between the best defenseman and a good second-pair defenseman is about $5 million, and a good third-pairing defenseman is only about $2 million. 

Nurse and Jones are being paid like franchise defensemen when really they might be more like the second-best defender on an average team. That’s a pretty small misevaluation by the teams who paid them, but it’s a gigantic difference in their on-ice value. Guerin might make this mistake with Faber, except he’s expected to make $8 to $9 million per year. After cap inflation, it seems like that deal has as much upside as downside. 

The last reason for these low-value contracts was strategic overpays. These include Colton Parayko (4th worst value), Mark Scheifele (6th), and Tyler Seguin (10th). Seguin is rounding out the end of a deal the Dallas Stars signed to keep their superstar scorer, and he’s the best contract on the list. There's not much to read into with him. 

However, Parayko and Scheifele are interesting, because they’re like rare and elite role players. Each player is great on one side of the puck and bad on the other. That allows their coaches to use them situationally, a strategic value the analytical models do not capture well. 

For example, the Winnipeg Jets can deploy Scheifele when they’re down a goal. He may be overpaid, and he may be the reason you’re down a goal in the first place. But they have a better chance to tie the game and get to overtime every time that happens. The same can be said of Parayko when the St. Louis Blues are defending a lead. They may have fewer leads than the average team, but he helps them close out those games more consistently. 

Ultimately, these contracts aren’t as bad as they seem because of that strategic value. So, whether Guerin overpays these types of role players or not, the model may be punishing these types of contracts more than their real-life impact. 

The good news is that Guerin has largely avoided the other three reasons for bad contracts. It’s certainly a concern that Minnesota’s contract efficiency has dropped significantly in only one year. If they are relying on a bounce-back year to fix these problems, they aren’t the first team to make that mistake. 

On the other hand, if Guerin can keep the roster competitive, it could prevent that error from compounding with other problems. The team has a long list of young players pushing for roster spots who could balance out some of the overpays on Minnesota’s books. 

Ultimately, Guerin’s free agent signings aren’t great, but they don’t seem to be so bad that Minnesota can’t compete in the near future. They’ll need to make room for prospects to join the team, and those prospects will need to work out. But those prospects all seem on track to be significant contributors. 

In addition, they can trade away players if they need to open spots for their prospects. Gaudreau and Hartman only have a 15-team no-trade list. Foligno and Middleton currently have full no-movement deals, but they will become a 15-team no-trade list in the summer of 2026. Moving those contracts may be inefficient, but it could make sense in service of opening a Stanley Cup window. 

The death of reports of Minnesota’s competitive window have been greatly exaggerated. The path is still there, and Guerin’s contract extensions won’t be the reason that it closes.