The Hockey PDOcast - How This Summer’s New Cap Environment Affects the Decision Making Process for Teams

Episode Date: June 24, 2025

Dimitri Filipovic is joined by Steve Werier to discuss how the rising cap affects the decision making process for teams, the ways it'll manifest in the first wave this summer, the opportunity cost of going bridge vs. long-term with RFAs, the pros vs. cons of Marner going 2-3 years on his next deal, and next steps for rebuilding teams like the Ducks, Sharks, and Penguins. If you'd like to gain access to the two extra shows we're doing each week this season, you can subscribe to our Patreon page here: www.patreon.com/thehockeypdocast/membership If you'd like to participate in the conversation and join the community we're building over on Discord, you can do so by signing up for the Hockey PDOcast's server here: https://discord.gg/a2QGRpJc84 The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the hosts and guests and do not necessarily reflect the position of Rogers Media Inc. or any affiliate.

since 2015. It's the Hockey P.D.O.cast with your host, Dmitri Filipovich. Welcome to the Hockey Pediocast. My name's Dmitra Filipovich. And joining me is my good buddy, Steve Ware here. Steve, what's going on in? Hey, pal, great to be back. Good morning. This is going to be a fun one. We're continuing with our theme of getting everyone set for the offseason moves this summer, the approach, the thinking behind how teams are handling this sort of unprecedented summer with the cap going up. And I thought it'd be fun. I a couple shows, one with with Drans, looking at some of this stuff. We had Shane on earlier this week talking about the most interesting teams,

and I thought it was fitting for us to mix in our, I'm going to label you as our PDOCAST front office slash business correspondent, tapping into obviously your wealth of experience, and we've done a couple fun shows together in the past. This is a perfect opportunity for us to chat. Again, discuss some of the latest trends we've seen around the league, and so far this offseason. Let's start off with this.

was a great launching point for us today. It's a question from the PDO cast Discord from one of our listeners, Max. And Max says, normally we view the winners of the offseason as the teams that spend the least. Do you think that'll still apply to this offseason? Will the smart teams be the ones that largely stay away from the volatility of new deals under the exploding cap? Or will identify them as the ones that exploit inaccuracies in an underdeveloped market? How do you weigh maintaining flexibility as the cap grows versus the potential? for signing underrate deals in a unique offseason like this one.

Do you look for more term thinking the AAV could age really well as the percentage of the cap it represents decreases or are you prioritizing less term thinking you'd rather have more cap space in future years as the cap keeps increasing? I think this is a really fun question for us to start off with because it really gets you into the headspace of what I think teams are deliberating right now. Obviously the cap went up to 95.5 for this coming season. is carving out an extra $7, $8 million in room. And I think a lot of teams around the league right now are trying to figure out kind of

how to approach this. We've seen this in the NBA in the past. And it resulted in a wild spending spree that a bunch of the teams involved came to quickly regret once the cap kind of stabilized and they lock themselves into these overpriced deals. I'm curious for your take on how you think teams are going to approach us, how you would, if you were in this position, what sort of the calculus is internally right now for teams discussing this sort of stuff.

That's such a good question, Max. And yeah, it goes back to the age-old question of, you know, that teams have always wrestled with, just with that new wrinkle of a, you know, more rapidly changing short-term cap move like you mentioned, of how do you trade off between, you know, short-term and long-term? And there's a question that's sort of the academic question of what teams should do. I think Max's question, probably your listeners would be more interesting,

like what we think teams will do and how they will do it. And part of that situational, right? like if you're a team that's really in your contending window and you've got a team like Colorado that has the McKinnons and McCars, it's tough to sort of take the line of, well, we'll have more cap space a couple of summers from now. And if we wait,

we can maybe get these real big fish because it's hard to look your players in the eye and say, you know, we're going to sort of slow play the next two years. Those guys are in their maximum window and those windows close and change faster and differently than we always expect. So that's tough. You know, hockey's also a people business, and it's run by managers who sometimes have their own, you know, short-term and long-term incentives and the same is with ownership as well.

So you have some teams who might not be in that maximum window, but still might have pushes and pulls, making them want to put some more chips now than they might. I think the teams, practically speaking, that will really drill down on Max's question, are teams situated like, Utah and like Columbus, where they might say, hey, we have a good young team. We have a good story behind us. We probably don't have anyone sort of really hammering us to absolutely go all in this summer. If we don't, we'll still be good. We'll still grow. We'll get better over the next two years.

And so maybe we can plan around, you know, the biggest names that might come available in a year or two when the cap jumps. As opposed to rushing, that can have a good payoff. It could also be to use your basketball tie-in. It can be like the Knicks from, you know, what, 2010 to 2020, where every summer I remember living in New York, and it was like, every summer we're going to get Kobe. Every summer we're going to get LeBron. And, you know, LeBron and Kobe didn't walk through those doors.

And that risk always exists. But to Max's other point about, like, how do you navigate cap uncertainty? And I think, you know, using phrase exploding cap, it's tricky because you really don't know how that will ultimately play out. You know, one argument is maybe there's fewer teams, now competing for those free agents this summer because the cap hasn't gone up. And from a supply and demand standpoint, there might be more demand and more dollars in the market two years from now. And it might be tougher to lock in players than versus now. You know, I know from personal experience,

there's always that give and take of if you're a GM or an assistant GM running the cap where you say, hey, listen, if I have a, you know, young player, do I optimize for long term at the expense of the number being higher in the next few years. And if you have a veteran player, like say, Brad Marshand, then, you know, do you say, do we optimize for term to keep that number down and maybe have that be a, you know, long-term issue, but not short-term. And, you know, I think the, I think we often overemphasize the short-term results of those decisions and, you know, de-emphasize the long-term.

I know for my own experience when I was, you know, negotiating Aaron Eckblad's eight-year deal, eight years ago, that deal expires next week. I sat down with our owners and we talked about, hey, if we get Aaron for eight years versus, say, five at a much lower number, you know, seven and eight years from now, one, a player like Aaron is going to be so much more expensive to re-sign than we think. And two, the acquisition cost of getting like a top pairing young right shot defenseman could be astronomical. And at the time, you know, we sort of got knocked for that deal saying, oh, you know, should it have been 7.5 or 7.2 or 6.9. And we talked about them, like, you know, we can suck our thumbs getting worried over a decimal point. But if we locked that guy in, that the payoff down the line could be huge. And, you know, he's now had two rings on that deal.

And even, you know, some of the lesser deals, like we had the same debate with Jonathan Huberto. Do we go four years and save money or do we go six? And we ultimately went six. And, you know, he ended up having his six year views to help that team get Matthew Kach. So, again, like the long-term payoffs of long-term deals are often underestimated at the onset. it, but yeah, we'll see what happens. Awesome question. Well, the reason why I picked this one right off the top is because there's so many layers to this. And I think the most interesting one to start off with for me. And Max hits on it a little bit. And you mentioned that with the Eckblatt example

as well is this increasingly important concept of opportunity costs, right? The idea that today's price is not yesterday's price and that being the case to an even greater effect with each passing season as the cap keeps going up by seven to nine million or whatever as it's projected to. And we have this running joke here in the PDO cast talking about Matt Coronado's extension over the past couple weeks and always referencing a Benepra actually getting into the meat of it. And I wanted to focus on that here because I think it's a great example of this, right? Like he signs this $6.5 million A.V.

He's a player with a career total of 27 goals and 56 points. And there was certainly a bunch of sticker shock around the league seeing that initial number when it was reported. and then you think about it a little bit more. And those seven years cover his age 23 to 29 seasons. I think it's the exact type of calculated bet the team should be trying to make right now for that type of player because it locks in a player at a fixed number for seasons where they're most likely

to improve through their mid-20s, produce more, and create additional bargaining power. And so let's say a guy like Coronado as this example, averages 25 to 30 goals over the next three. years and he had signed a three-year bridge as we've seen teams do in the past of some of these second contracts. And then you fast forward to the summer of 28 and he's going to be a 26-year-old RFA with arbitration rights. He's going to be one year out from UFA with only the last year of team control. And the cap's going to be bordering on what, like 120 million at that point of things

keep going this way. And so what does that contract if you come back to the negotiating table at that point look like and how much does that cost you in years four to seven of the deal compared to the 6.5 you haven't locked in for obviously we've seen this go the other way I think uh the coyotes with with John Chaka did this with a number of their players and for certain guys it worked like a Jacob Chikron for other guys like a Christian Dvorak maybe it didn't but I do think this this question of bridge versus long term second contract is going to become an even larger inflection point for organizations in these negotiations. in the midst of this cap spike and trying to get those players to sign on for as many years as they can,

just so you avoid getting into a different financial landscape for the next contract and getting into a potential bidding war or having to wildly overpay when you could have got them at a much lower cost. Yeah, I think that's all right. I mean, I think the short and simple answer to what you sort of put together there is, as the cap rises, the penalty for being late and being too conservative gets bigger and bigger. I always say the one of many hockey fiches, but the one that I dislike the most has always been if you have time, use it.

Because none of us have as much time in life or in hockey as we think. But especially when it comes to negotiating and being proactive, there are just massive, massive benefits to, you know, making smart bets and making early bets. And on Coronado, you know, you mentioned his production to date. and you know, as you know and I know and your listeners know, you know, good teams pay for future performance.

They don't pay for past performance or they shouldn't. And so it's, you know, it's on a team like Calgary or whatever team has these young players. They should know better than anyone else. You know, what kind of player he is, how he maintains his body, how he's, you know, enjoying the market, how he's liked in the room and how he's going to develop as a player. They should have the best information on all of that,

especially nowadays with all this tracking data and advanced fitness and sports science. and they should be in a position to say, you know, we are comfortable that a player like Matt is going to have a continuing upward trajectory, or at least that's a really smart bet for us to make and to make those decisions. And, you know, historically, the cost on those bridge deals might be a couple million dollars here or there. You know, again, we talked about Hoover earlier. He signed a, you know, short-term bridge in the threes instead of a long-term second contract. And so when I signed him for six, it was deal number three.

If it had been deal number two, the number would have been lower. And that's the case with every young development developing player with cost control. So those smart bets, obviously, if you make them right, they pay off. And then the other piece of that is, you know, even if he isn't a perfect fit for whatever reason, if you sign good young players early, you can monetize those deals. You can flip them elsewhere. The cost shouldn't be prohibitive. There's a big difference between, you know, having to trade a veteran UFA signing.

that that's clearly on the downside versus saying, you know, we have a 25-year-old who's good, and we want to go out and acquire another 25-year-old who's better. There's usually a market. You can undo those decisions and they're less one-way doors than some sort of the other moves you can make as a team. Well, and I think the other thing that might embolden organizations and make the risk or the potential downside of some of these deals more palatable is exactly what you just said there, right? This idea that I do think we're seeing there's a little. less risk of true kind of quote unquote poison pill contracts that you wind up being stuck

with if things do go south and the player's value depreciate. Certainly the case if a guy's 25 still compared to, let's say, 32 and you sign him as a UFA. but the point withstanding, like, I just think there's a larger pool now of bad teams that we've seen with viable room to take your problem off your hands and the cost for those types of deals is not at all what it once used to be. right in the first week of this offseason alone we've already seen

the Rangers take on Chris Crider 6.5 million for two more years off the duck's hands and give them a third rounder back the devil's clear the last year of Hollas 3.15 and got a fourth rounder back Dallas sent out Mason Marchments 4.5 million for one year and got a third and fourth back and then Seattle

went around after that and cleared Brokowski's 5.5 million for two years and got Villano back and they might keep them as a fourth line center they might just buy them out and that would be cost them less than 800K and they're just clearing a bunch of cap room and doing so and not paying the type of sweetener price or attaching any sort of futures the way we might have seen otherwise right and so I think that's a very interesting dynamic that's kind of developing here because I think we were so

we were taught that there'd become a become a price to this and so I think teams might have been scared off by it previously and if there's longer term on it I think that certainly might still apply all those guys I mentioned also you look at the contract specifics and all of the their actual salaries that are being paid out in those years they're owed are lower than the AAV. And so the note that I kind of made in an earlier show was I think if you're a GM acquiring one of these players and all these teams that made these trades are likely going to be lottery teams again who are quite bad. With the cap going up, I think there's been some concern from especially smaller markets that they might not, the owner might not actually want to foot the bill of a 100,

110, 120 down the road, a million dollar salary expenditure on their roster. And so these are, you know, one million, one and a half here or there that you're kind of saving in terms of actual salary being paid. But I think those types of deals are just so much easier to move at this point than they might have been in the past. Yeah. I mean, I was surprised by some of those deals and the prices being, you know, lower than one might expect.

And for the reasons that you lay out, you know, there's some justification to an extent. I think it was incredibly valuable to the teams who moved on from some of those contracts. And probably, to your point, it was like, you know, useful, marginally beneficial to the acquiring clubs for reasons of talent and cap and all that. And again, like these are, you know, these sort of accounting tricks of acquiring a player whose cap exceeds the cap. It's been going on for quite some time. I think you mentioned John Chaker earlier, like when I dealt with John and he was running the coyotes at the time and he had an ownership group that was that was really laser focused on, you know, making frugal decisions, put it that way. He was active and strategic in the

market of adding players like that and it would probably surprise a lot of your listeners if they sort of looked behind the scenes at, you know, how much in certain markets in certain clubs, and this might be less so now than before, but certainly, you know, the last 10 years has been the case, you know, it is urgent at some clubs to make very cash-sensitive decisions and to manage their affairs in a way that might be more cost-focused than you might expect. I'm certainly, you know, acquainted with clubs who, you know, in the past would have directives say, you know, we can only sign an AHL veteran for up to 70 grand. And if it's a player with a two-way deal and a, you know, AHL minimum of 200K, well, that's, you know, that's too rich for us. We're managing with a certain

model and decisions like that, which, you know, would never be explained away as such. But they do come into play. And to your point, you know, I think we've seen that variance in baseball more than any other sport, right, where you have the haves and the have-nots and the teams that are the have-nots either by choice or by necessity say, like, we're not even going to try. Like, we are hitting that floor in the most minimally invasive way possible to put together a club that will allow us to, you know, capture revenue sharing. But we're not interested. in fighting for 8 or 9th. We're interested in getting the lottery picks and banking money and setting ourselves up for

long-term success. So, you know, that does still come into play. I think on those deals you mentioned. And it probably always will. You'll never have sort of uniformity among goals and sort of, you know, financial situations across the league. I want to talk to you, a marner, because he's certainly centered in this UFA class as the best player available and probably the best guy that's hit unrestricted for agency in a while.

And there's this growing sentiment that he's going to potentially sign something like, let's say, $13, $14 million A.A.V for two years and go short term. And that would allow him to reenter the UFA market in a summer of 2027. Let's say if he goes two years when he's 30, the cap is up to 113.5. And I think players in the past have been reticent to do so because you just take the money when it's available to you. There's so much inherent risk in this sport, maybe less so for him. because of his specific playing style, he absorbs less contact. I think he's missed less than like 50 combined games in his nine NHL seasons. Now, some would say that doesn't include all of the playoff games he didn't show up for.

But I'm curious for your take on that from both a player and a team perspective and whether if you were one of these teams, let's say a Vegas or Carolina or, you know, the California teams, would that be a more intriguing proposition? for you in terms of acquisition or one that it's a massive bill. Obviously, you have to foot right out of the gate for a short term. You ought to sell it on your owners, certainly, and especially if you're a bad team. But it removes a lot of the risk of a typical UFA signing where you're getting into years six, seven, eight, and all of a sudden the guys in his mid-30s and becomes a contract that

you wish you hadn't signed. Yeah, I think it's super interesting, which is situation from a structural standpoint. I have a lot, you know, had a lot of people ask about it recently. you know, I think if we, like, let's take the assumption, not for right or wrong, like setting aside the, I think it was the Martin Sheen to Charlie Sheen line and Wall Street of how many yachts can you water ski behind. But let's say Mitch's interest. No judgment is maximizing his revenue over his playing career, his earnings, because there's always going to be a pie. It's always going to be paid and he's one of the best players in the world. So why not take the biggest piece he can? And maybe in retirement, he has some incredible lofty family. goals that he can leverage by, you know, maximizing every dollar. So if that's his standpoint, does it make sense, like you said, to go shorter to start versus what historically has been done by everyone, including guys like McDavid, and just going along and taking the money right away and doing it after?

I think the answer is yes. Obviously, there's injury risk and other risk. But if the question is, would you rather go short than long or long than short, the answer should be maybe the former. And there's a couple reasons why. Number one, if you sign a short-term deal, if he says I'm going to sign three or four years right now or two years at, say, 13, 14, 15 mil.

He'll be off that deal in his early 30s. He'll be at his absolute peak. And he'll probably be able to go out and secure a seven- or eight-year deal, whatever the cap the maximum is under the new CBA or the renegotiation. And he'll still be a top-the-world player. And by then, like you said, the cap's way up. So maybe he'll go three by 15 and then he'll go eight by 17. The inverse of that, the old way of doing it is you go eight years based on the current cap where teams have constraints from day one fitting you in because the cap's lower at the beginning and your cap is uniform throughout the deal.

And then your deal's up and you're 35, 36 years old. And even if you're a world class player, you might only have, let's be generous, maybe a four or five year offer. And that might not be at the cap ceiling. So if you actually map it out, like back to the napkin math, if Mitch goes like three by 14 and then goes eight by 16 versus going eight by 13 and, you know, let's say then three by 12, he ends up like $40 or $50 million ahead, which again, just from a accounting stamp rate is a huge amount of money. And so does that course of action make sense? Maybe. And then on top of that, you start off with that short term deal and it lets him control his desk me a little better as well and avoid. you know, signing yourself away for eight years off the bat through your prime.

So from his perspective, I get it. It's ambitious, but he is one of those rare players who, you know, may be the equivalent of an NBA supermax guy who can go out and get the absolute max. And so he's positioning himself if he goes that route to potentially considerably make a lot more money in his career. So if I'm Darren Ferris and I'm Mitch and, you know, that's part of the goal. I get it. I don't think it's crazy. I think it's cool.

If you're one of the teams. If you're one of the teams, it really depends, right? Like, where are you? What can you stomach? What's your goal? When's your window to win? And so if you're a team like Vegas

and you've already got your, you know, your jack icos and your other, you know, really high-end guys and you're able to attract top talent, then, you know, you're very incentivized to have that year-one number below and not sort of be locked into a, massive number to start. If instead you're say a, you know, maybe a San Jose or an Anaheim, and it's just, you know, we have tons of cap space. We can bring in a transformative player like Mitch. We might not be able to bring in the next Mitch Martin, even though some guys at that

level might be available in a year or two. You know, I don't think it would be crazy if they went out and sort of signed him for an astronomical figure. You know, what will happen? I'm applying to guess he'll probably target one of those upper echelon teams. And like you said, if he does, he'll probably go, if he goes short to midterm, it won't be at the cap ceiling. But I do think it'll position him for his next contract to be massive. And it can really pay off if he plays it right. I mean, beyond the financial incentives from a player perspective,

and this kind of came up in the conversation last week, after McDavid's post-cup presser when he was talking about his next contract, and there's an idea that he might go four or five years instead of the eight you'd expect typically from a star player like that not only keeping the team honest but also for a lot of these teams like let's say it is a Vegas you wind up going to if you're a mariner they've shown a resourcefulness I guess to keep reinventing themselves and consolidating good players into great players and reopening their their window to compete and they're going to keep being aggressive in doing so but at some point the tab will come on that, right?

And we've seen that with pretty much every contender, whether it's the kings or the Blackhawks or the penguins or the Bruins over the years, where there reaches a point after a decade of contention where your pipeline is just so dry, you've kind of boxed yourself into a lot of veteran contracts and you're out of your window, and all of a sudden, if you're a player like that and you're 30, 31, instead of being stuck in that spot, it allows you to then essentially, if you want to keep competing for a Stanley Cup, choose your own adventure after that.

From a team perspective, though, beyond less risk in the back half of that deal, I think an interesting thing to think about here, and we keep referencing the NBA because it's a good sort of blueprint for what happened here. Let's say you're one of these teams that's up against the cap right now, and you find a way to either move out of contract or bring him in short term when that deal expires. Let's say it's a two-year deal, for example, right? and his AAB is 14 million that you sign him to. That following summer when it expires,

the cap goes up another 9.5 million or so and his contract comes off the books. All of a sudden now you have what, back in the middle of math, like $23, $24 million of money that's been opened up to potentially remake your team or adjust on the fly. And that's not a concept we typically associate with hockey team building, but I know that in the NBA around the deadline,

and expiring contracts are viewed as legitimate assets for teams. And so just essentially that salary slot coming off the books and creating an opening for you to spend elsewhere is an interesting wrinkle to this as well from a team perspective. I think it gives you more flexibility, more malleability on the fly and doesn't necessarily box you into being one particular type of team for the duration of that deal. I think that's totally right. And you know, you often see this analysis, especially in hockey like you said, of well, if you sign a player to two by 14, then how do you plan around that with your other contracts,

and how do you plan ahead for a year three when, you know, just two years from now, you're going to lose this great player. I think it's important to keep in mind, like for many owners and managers, you only need to win once. Like if you can win that cup, if you can have that one incredible season, like in basketball, look at the Raptors with Kauai Leonard, you know, maybe by analogy there, it's worth it. Like, you bring your fans one ring. It's worth it.

And a guy like Mitch significantly transforms any club for the better, you know, setting aside of this or Toronto narrative is just about player performance and whatnot. Like, you know, you got a 100-point player to your team for most clubs. That's going to give you a better chance of winning than otherwise. And so I think some teams would be willing to, like you said, you know, A kick the can down the road by making that sort of commitment to a player like that just because those players don't walk in the door every day, even to play teams that are lucky to have, like you said, sort of an enduring ability to attract top talent.

And then, yeah, it's not a bad thing to position yourself to have a clean slate to go after the biggest fish. Teams often find themselves admired in opportunity costs or bad decisions. And we even see that, you know, not bad decisions, but like even an expansion club, like a Seattle who is now three years in, you know, they have a lot of sort of, sort of, mid-tier contracts to mid-tier players for better or for worse, which is just to say, like, it happens fast. Like, life moves fast. And so it's rare to be a San Jose who says,

hey, we've got like three or four young superstars and no one locked in beyond a couple of years, really, that matters. That doesn't happen much. And to give yourself that freedom and flexibility is, yeah, I think it's totally alluring. Well, and the crux of Max's question here, I think my final point on this, and kudos to Max because he gave us 30 plus minutes here of,

of banter back and forth relating to the question. But this idea of sort of sequencing and timing out your contracts with the cap going up and applying real additional thought to the structuring of those deals in terms of term, right? Because I think there's going to be, and what I said about the Coronado thing, it maybe kind of flies in the face of this, but on the one hand, the idea of locking in a longer term deal that theoretically is going to suppress the AAV and become a better value as the cap goes up in the later years. of that deal versus sort of keeping your cap sheet clear in those future seasons, right? Because every year we're going to be entering with the cap going up 8 to 9 million each of those summers a new landscape. And so essentially being able to kind of remake your team in those spots is going to be interesting, kind of keeping your powder dry or maybe accruing additional cap space, the way

the hurricanes have sort of been doing in a more flat cap environment over the years where you just to essentially keep stacking resources and flexibility. And then it allows you to jump at opportunities. You could argue about the success of that in terms of actually winning a Stanley Cup, but it's clear that they're in a great spot organizationally compared to a lot of other contenders that are much more boxed in with less flexibility. And so some of these teams, like there's such a, and you mentioned this with the kind of personal angle to this, right,

where everyone's got some to approve, everyone's got some sort of an agenda in terms of their own longevity. and every team has a desire, I think, to kind of finalize their roster in a way on July 1st, not only to have a player to introduce to the media, sell jerseys, get everyone excited that's in your fan base, but just have kind of summon a show for your work immediately and those sort of immediate rewards of it. Unfortunately, there's no Stanley Cup awarded this time a year in July or August, and in fact, it's the opposite where there's a full graveyard of teams that went out and spent big in

free agency and thought they were set and then the game started and all of a sudden they realized they might have miscalculated that. So I think the idea of maybe keeping your powder dry, it's much less instantly satisfying or gratifying for everyone involved. You don't want to have much to show for it. But just in terms of keeping that room open and then allowing it to keep building over a couple years, all of a sudden now it's going to be an interesting competitive advantage, I think potentially emerging where you get to 2027, 2028 and all of a sudden you just have 30, 40 million dollars in cap room to spend, you need the right players to actually spend it on eventually if you want to win a Stanley Cup. But at least it gives you the opportunity to do so,

as opposed to some teams that are just going to essentially be re-rolling it every summer and getting back to square one and trying to shed contracts and trying to get back into the mix and join the market with you. Yeah, I think that's fair. I mean, I think it should be conducive to teams taking extremist approaches, right? You should either be all in or you should be all all on the sidelines baking cap space. This setup, this configuration, like you mentioned, where if you bank cap space, you can just have a massive amount of dry powder

with a number of super high-end players set to potentially become free agents in the coming years. You know, it should be an argument for either spend all your money to win because it's always good to win and it's never good to wait or bank that cap space. It should be an argument against sort of, you know, continuing to fight free. through ninth continuing to just get in the playoffs.

I think you and Drenz talked about recently just how, you know, the old, you know, the old mythology that all you ought to do is give yourself a chance to go in and then anything can happen. That's not really as true anymore in the NHL and other sports. It's really, you know, if you look at who the best teams are objectively, either all season or like should be all season, but taking it a little bit easier. Like those teams do well in the playoffs and the teams. That's where to sneak in.

usually don't find themselves in for long. And so I think that, you know, their team is you and I could both name, and I won't name them, who sort of seem year after year to be fighting just to get into the playoff spot, which helps for job security. And, you know, it helps for to some marginal extent in the short term with revenue.

Like that approach becomes less justifiable in an academic sense with, you know, Max's question. And you and I throwing it around when, if you bank that cap space instead of rushing to spend it on sort of middling players, you know, you'd have a massive gratification, albeit to your point of delayed one. Yeah, I think there's certain organizations that are trying to hit a moving target and finding it difficult to find that aim. I think what makes it such a fascinating offseason for a variety of reasons is, as we mentioned, more teams have capspace, that you look at the talent available in the UFA pool beyond guys like Mariner and Eilers,

and there's not really a commensurate level of it available to go around and account for all that you've found money for everyone that has it. And so how teams approach that and how much forward thinking and planning they do as opposed to those immediate returns is going to be very telling. And I think that's also why we're going to see a bunch of, I mean, we've already seen some trades certainly, but, you know, interest ramping up in the RFA market, trying to get some of these guys to account for some of that available salary in more creative routes than we've seen in the past makes for, makes for fun for everyone involved. All right. See, let's take our break here. And then we come back, we will jump right back in where. we're going to close out today's show with some other fun topics. You're listening to the Hockey P.D.O.Cast streaming on the SportsNet Radio Network.

All right. We're back here in the Hockey Piedocast joined by Steve. Steve, let's keep it going. We got about 17 or 18 minutes or so here. I got a couple topics I want to run by you. The first is the Trevor Zegra's trade from earlier this week. It came out the morning that Shade and I were recording and we gave our quick thoughts on it. I've had a couple, well, I've had a full day now, essentially, to give him more thought. And I just wanted to add sort of the context of I think why and probably the most interesting component of the whole thing for me beyond the player involved and the fit and going a filly and all that is just sort of the why now question as opposed to waiting till in season, right?

Because I think Ducks fans were pretty disappointed by the extent of the return. And it's a fair question of after a miserable year with great croton essentially suppressing everyone's value, why you wouldn't try to rehab some of it. And if you decide the player isn't going to be there long term, at least you can give it 20, 30, 40 games and try to maybe get more from a team that becomes desperate in season. I haven't really seen anyone bring up this angle of it as much. And I'm curious for your take on whether it's sort of as simple as this. But Zegra's an R. Beligible RFA next summer.

And in the summer of 2026 at the same time, that contract will come up. The ducks have Leo Carlson, Carter Goce, Jackson Lecombe, Pavel Minchikov, and Olin Zellweger, all as RFA is up for massive people. pay raises, they're certainly going to be able to accommodate it because they have so little future money on the books. That same summer Truba and Goode has come off and that clears $12 million. So it's not necessarily a financial issue, but from an organization and internal perspective,

I want your take on whether it's sort of as simple as getting ahead of the business a little bit and trying to get out from under a logjam and maybe just having one less headache or potential question mark to worry about down the road next summer. Yeah, you know, I remember back in Florida one summer where we were signing a lot of sort of our core young players and we talked about and we moved out a couple of couple players who were in that 25, 24, 26 year old range who, you know, our determination was, these are good players. They were good guys in the room, but they weren't, like we talked about earlier, like at either

extreme. So they weren't young entry level guys that we wanted to throw all our chips in and sign them long term for huge money. And they weren't sort of, you know, veteran core pieces that we wanted to sign sort of as complimentary one-year deal as low amounts. They were the type of guys who you'd have to extend back then, you know, in the three to four years at the three to four million dollar range. And our analysis then was like those deals become problematic because they're typically

two-way door contracts that become a little, but they're hard to move. Like they aren't huge numbers, but they're hard to move often. And they add up. You have two of those guys, you know, two guys at four is eight. That's a lot. That's the same as one huge guy. And so looking at Anaheim, yeah, they have all these young players who are talented. Some of them are probably unknowns how great they'll be and how big their

numbers are going to get, especially with a guy like Joel coming into coach and maybe some, you know, additions on top of Crider to make them more competitive. And I think it goes back to, you know, a discussion before the break about you really want to be all in, where you want to be rebuilding and sort of buying your time, but you don't be half, you don't be sort of halfway in. And a guy like Zegras, who, like you said, is an RFA, getting closer to the UFA age, but not there yet. You know, he's going to cost some money to keep if he has a decent year or better. But I more importantly, if your team like Anaheim that's really building on the up towards like that crest of being a super competitive team full of high-end young players ready to win sooner

sooner than later, you may not want to make the personal investment. If you aren't all in on like this is a core player for us, you know, I think turning the corner with withdrawal coming in and a new high pool for a coach like that, they're going to want to really spend like a huge amount of time on effort on, you know, coaching up and mentoring and making sure those young players are in a position to win soon. And if he doesn't fit sort of in that mix for, you know, rightly or wrongly, maybe it makes sense to sort of, you know,

trim that group down a little bit. And like you said, focus on some of those others. And that might be the bigger return there is freeing up that spot. He might, you know, he's not really a fourth line player. He's going to play higher in your lineup, if at all.

And so maybe a little bit of, you know, not addition to sit by some traction, so to speak, but they might, you know, to what we discussed earlier, like having that cap space, having that roster bought might be a value to them in addition to just the assets that came back. There's also an element of, he was the ninth though

a pick in 2019 and that is a pick from the bygone Bob Murray era and there's certainly a level of attachment I think GMs have to their own selections versus players they've inherited from their predecessor and those guys kind of getting leapfrogged internally over time the way Ziegress was by

Carlson and McTavish particularly down the middle over the past couple of years. And so yeah, I there's a lot of fascinating stuff there. We can talk more about, you know, the approach here for Rebeak and the Ducks compared to maybe even, you know, their California counterpart in San Jose with what Mike Greer has done. I think you and I both agree that on the one hand, it's easyer in the full kind of scorched earth tear down process that the sharks have been going through the past couple years of

just accumulating as much future capital as you can and playing the, role of dumping ground for contracts. Now, what Greer's done in that time, where he essentially turns Walman, Granland, C.C. and Blackwood, who he all just took as camp dumps for a variety of reasons into two firsts, two seconds, a fourth, and a 26-year-old Timothy Lilligran, who played top four minutes for them. And is either going to be there long-term with his score or can be flipped again for additional assets, comparing it to what Burr Beek's done, where they've, you know, high in the draft, certainly accumulated a top. of very interesting young players that I still have high hopes for, but haven't managed

where they're at in their organizational cycle when they've been bad the past couple years quite as well in terms of optimizing that cap space they have available to them and recouping the max amount of futures and, you know, the prime example of that being essentially just handing the Rangers 14.5 million worth of get out of jail-free vouchers in taking on Trubein-Krider from them. So I don't know, do you have any thoughts on kind of those two respective approaches or what Mike Greer has done in San Jose and kind of what's ahead for for the sharks as they try to become more competitive and actually put together an NHL roster that can you know grow and succeed with with Celebrini and Will Smith and

whoever they wind up taking second overall this week. Yeah I think you framed that well like it's earlier in San Jose they've made fewer decisions and they probably have a few less strikes on the board. They've batted well. You know they've they've made good, like, you know, good drafting decisions beyond, you know, the obvious selections. They, by all accounts, made a good decision with a, you know, young coach in Worsowski who seems quite popular in the room. They play an up-tempo style. They brought in veterans, you know, like a to Foley and, you know, brought in monetized assets far better than many other teams have with the names you mentioned. So, you know, that's, you know, those are good signs. I think,

you know, there's always a tendency to get excited when a team sells a player for assets in a way that's maybe easier than we might expect, but they've got good returns most of the time, you know, some better than others. Like, you know, the Walman deal is probably more exciting than maybe the Zetterlin deal, but altogether those are, that's a real good portfolio of asset harvesting than they've done. You know, Anaheim has a good young team. They, you know, for either right reasons or wrong, they obviously had a coach that they determined wasn't the best fit.

That happens, you know, a lot in the NHL. But hopefully they've ready the ship now. And yeah, I mean, there's, you know, there's a few moves with those veteran assets where even if, you know, you're gratuitous and say, hey, those are good players in the room, we had to bring someone in, they're good mentors, they're useful. If you flip it around as you did and said, you know, looking with truth serum, what would the Rangers say they were willing to pay to move on from a $14 million cap liability to a, you know, veteran forward who they seem to be on the outs with by all.

accounts on the last season, I would think that number or that cost would probably be higher than what they ultimately paid. But who's to say? So yeah, you know, I like the way San Jose's positioned. I think they might be in play for some surprising names now. And if not, they're the exact type of team like you said that in, you know, a year or two when their 30 million of cap space becomes like 70. They're going to do some really interesting things because they'll be full to. All right, let's end with this, and I think it's a good segue. You mentioned the Rangers there. The other piece of news from this week, and this was reported today,

the Rangers are choosing to convey the first rounder they sent out in the J.T. Miller trade at this year's draft instead of, or they're sending the Penguins, the 12th overall pick, giving our Kyle Tubis 11th and 12th back to back on Friday, as opposed to choosing to roll it over next season and having it be this kind of dark cloud handing over them where it's an unprotected pick in this highly anticipated. Gavin McKenna draft. And I think there's a lot of interesting layers to this for both sides. Maybe we can get into them here quickly for the Rangers.

You know, they obviously had a nightmare season last year going from winning the president's trophy and making an Eastern Conference final appearance to miss in the playoffs and then not to mention all the drama that surrounded them in 24, 25. And sort of maybe what this, if you're reading into this, whether it signals either expectations or acknowledgement of their current reality and situation or whether it's as simple as give away the 12 overall pick. And then if we bounce back with a new coach and make some moves and, you know, it's heavily reported that they're going to be after a gabercall, for example, to try to fix the defense. It gives you the 2026 pick all of a sudden

now back and play to be used down the line as an asset as opposed to having kind of taken that off your board. What are you, what are you reading into the Rangers decision to go this route as opposed to the alternative? Yeah. I think. most cases, and in the case of Chris Drury, this is not the case because he was recently extended and he's also Chris Drury. Like, you know, managers are usually biased to avoid setting themselves up for clearly making fireball offenses. And, you know, typically, you know, moving an unprotected first round pick that risk becoming Gavin McKenna, if it became that, arguably, you know, to many would be a fireball offense. And so it's probably sound management

to take that risk off the table. I don't think that came in to play for, York for a few reasons, but getting back to the strategy of it, yeah, I think a lot of things came into play. You know, one of them may just be that they felt that this year's draft class and maybe who they'd be selecting in that range, you know, isn't super exciting. That's sort of a tough qualitative assessment that obviously in hindsight, those sort of expectations often don't reflect how things play out. But, you know, I think that probably came into play a little bit for.

them maybe just, you know, take their medicine now, have this sort of chapter closed on that deal. You know, no one's talking about it into next year of what's this pick going to be, what's it not going to be. I think internally, they probably didn't expect or don't anticipate being anywhere near a lottery team next year, but notwithstanding that, you know, they probably don't mind just saying, hey, that deal is closed, that's done. There's no sort of albatross of worrying about what it might or might not be. and they move on.

And in any event, they're sort of a veteran, you know, win now club based on their portfolio of players. They aren't a team that might necessarily be super focused on, you know, what they get at number 11 this year. They might have figured that pick anyway. Well, I think for the penguins, it's also interesting, right, because I've been thinking about this. And, you know, they finish the past three years, 20th, 20th, and 24th, respectively. And that's, I think, without even really trying to be bad. It was kind of organic in terms of deterioration and looking ahead now. They're almost positioned as the only team, I think, that actively wants to be bad.

You know, you could have argued that would have applied to Philly because there was this internal struggle between Danny Breer and Tortorella for the past couple of years, but then they go out and they hire Tocke. They make the Segris trade. Anaheim, San Jose in Chicago are all certainly trying to take steps towards respectability and being competitive. Boston bottomed out last year. but, you know, when you have Pasturenak and Swayman at key positions and McAvoy and Linholm coming back,

I think that's going to complicate that pursuit. And then maybe Nashville and Seattle, but, you know, their recent moves kind of suggest a different intention. And they still might get there. But at least for now, they're not kind of fully embracing it. And there's no real Arizona of years past that is kind of the placeholder here. So I think Dubus and the Penguins are an interesting spot here. Maybe having all the cap space they have to take on contracts and reclamation projects is, and as big of an asset as it might have been in the past for reasons we set off the top.

But it's still a fascinating spot in terms of potential moves or decisions that sort of differentiate you a little bit to one end of the extreme that a lot of your other competitors in this market. Yeah, I think Pittsburgh is a fascinating case study there. Like you said, they were not trying to rebuild or they were maybe trying to have their cake and eat it to and sort of be opportunistic about adding assets at the same time as signing some of those big veteran extensions and UFAs that they did. a couple years ago. And now they've certainly pivoted, you know, even though they still have,

you know, a super high performing, you know, Sidney Crosby in that lineup, it seems pretty apparent. As you mentioned, they've pivoted towards, you know, very much tilting the balance towards rebuilding. It'll be neat how that changes if there's sort of an ownership change on the horizon and different pushes and pulls, you know, from there. But I think Kyle is probably thrilled at the prospect of having, you know, starting off with what, two picks or, you know, just outside the top 10. They'll have some good trade down opportunities, you know, some other fun things you can do with picks like that that a manager like him will be excited about.

And they'll probably set up pretty well, you know, if in fact they are one of the only sellers with, you know, maybe it's guys like Raquel that they might be able to send to some markets out west or elsewhere, you know, the fewer other teams that are in that position and in that position that early, you know, that that should go well for them. And we'll see what they do with that. All right. See, we've got to get out of here. They're going to drag us out of the studio.

I really appreciate you taking the time. I know you don't really have anything in a plug because you're very different than a lot of our usual guests. But everyone go check out Steve on Twitter, I guess. He does some writing for Buckpedia, especially during these landmark events. And I always appreciate your insight. So it's great to have you on. For the listeners, they can give us five-star reviews to help us out wherever they listen.

Join us in the PDO cast, Discord as well. And that's going to be all for today. The scheduling plan for the rest of the week is we're going to let things marinate for a couple days here, see what happens at the draft and then come back this weekend to break down all of the latest news. So enjoy the draft, especially for the fans whose teams are picking high and see you back here soon.

Thank you for listening to the Hockey PDOCast streaming on the Sports Night Radio Network.