The Hockey PDOcast - Offseason Prep From a Front Office Perspective

Episode Date: June 24, 2024

Dimitri Filipovic is joined by Steve Werier to provide a look behind the curtain at how teams prepare for offseason player movement. They discuss the timeline for putting target lists together, the importance of the draft combine, negotiating with other executives and player agents, and the art of getting your own restricted free agents to sign long-term. 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.

addressing to the mean since 2015. It's the Hockey PEDEOCast with your host, Dmitri Filipovin. Welcome to the HockeyPedocast. My name's Dimitra Filipovich, and joining me as my good buddy, Steve Warrior. Steve, what's going on, man? Hey, what's that to be? Great to be back. We're back for round two. As people listening will surely remember back at the trade deadline.

We had you on to talk about the approach, the process for navigating that key part of the NHL schedule from the team side of things. And then at the end of that conversation, we promise the listeners, we do a similar thing to preview the offseason when we got to this point of the year. And so here we are. So we're nothing, if not meant of our word. And I think listeners will really enjoy getting a rare look behind the curtain kind of at how an NHL front office prepares for a typical offseason of personnel moves, getting all their ducks in a row, getting everything in order, everything that goes into it kind of logistically. So that's what we're going to try and do here today over the next hour. I think we should start with kind of a general timeline, let's say, in a typical year, you know, the playoffs and you start the off season. I'm sure there's some sort of a, you know, depending on when you get eliminated or how far your season goes along, there's an initial information gathering period, I assume, right? Kind of where you're either internally establishing targets, you're having communication amongst your organization of like guys you'd be interested in, how they'd fit into the team in the grand scheme of things. Maybe you're having a line of communication.

with other executives or player agents, kind of getting feelers out for where things stand, what the market's like, what's all that like in terms of just the general sort of initial preparation, I guess, to get yourself ready for the calm before the storm. Yeah, I think he hit on that really, well they're describing it. It really is this confluence of all the major events,

and it's sort of like the life cycle of a team, that all happen in this super short window where you have, you know, at the end of the season, and then you have the draft combine, the draft itself. Now you have a negotiating window with UFAs right away after that for six or so days where a lot of interesting things go down. And then you have the free agent window. But within that you also, of course, have your own players who you're talking about,

and that includes RFAs and prospects who are coming off their maybe entry level or their RFA deals where there's a lot of excitement and interest and strategy going on to try to walk those players up potentially before. some of those other dominoes fall. And then, you know, layered into that, if you're in the role I was in, you know, helping out with the cap as well. You've got to sort of manage all those pieces. Think about, you know, how one thing affects the other, manage all the contracts you have,

the number you're allowed and really be mindful of all these interesting things like opportunity costs and figure out, you know, if we do X, does that mean we can't do Y? And what if when we talk to this other team at the combine or the draft, we find out there's this whole other scenario we never thought about that we want to, have flexibility on too. And it gets super interesting. You only have a couple windows a year. We have everyone together from all teams around the league

and sort of the same buildings at the same time. And you get some really interesting discussions and a lot of fantasy hockey type ideas that don't come to fruition, but also a lot of really interesting things that do. What's the order of operation like, though, in terms of obviously, I think there's an element of, taking care of all your business in-house with your RFAs and all that in players you already

have in place. But if you especially are in a position where you have cap space heading into an off-season or you're looking to make some serious moves, whether it's upgrading or whether it's changing the configuration or dynamic of your roster, what's the order of operation like from like figuring out who you're targeting and then getting those wheels in motion? Because I imagine there's also an element of, you know, clearing it with ownership from like approving spending or how much your internal budget is or rules to abide by. Obviously, whatever the coaching staff is of how you're going to use this player, because I think sometimes teams get into a situation where they bring in a guy and maybe whoever brought him in had an

idea for them and then they're not used that way. And then there's mixed messages and it doesn't work out and we never really got a chance to see it all the way through. What's that sort of like in terms of just like putting together, I guess, a list or is there even a list of sort of targets for you in the off season for guys you're going to make a serious pitch at trying to acquire. Yeah, there's a list. You know, maybe the best way to understand it or think about it is there's a couple of different buckets, right? The first one is things that you can get complete certainty on.

So you mentioned like a budget and, you know, most of the time, not all the time. If your owner is setting a budget for the off season and for the next lead year, you can get certainty on that. And if your management, you need to know that. you need to know, are you a CAP team or are you going to be a, you know, $70 million team and $70 million team? You want to finalize those discussions as early as possible and get that for a final answer and where you're going to be.

Some of those other scenarios and issues you talk about, you can sort of go both ways. You know, on one hand, you want certainty from a CAP perspective, a Ross perspective and everything else in terms of, say, walking up a restricted free agent early and knowing what they're going to cost knowing they want to stay, knowing they won't be susceptible to an offer sheet. But there's a tradeoff there, right? And the tradeoff there is, you know, the optionality of, A, maybe saying, hey, we like this player. We think he's worth $3 million a year on a, you know, a short-term deal.

But what if someone else comes available in trade who we think is worth $8 million, you know, that we can get for three? Do we want to make that commitment early? And then there's also, you know, we had this in one of our off-season that I could remember, But you think about leverage too, or maybe you say, hey, we could sign this player early. But if we go on, you know, go out in the market and acquire a couple other similar players, maybe that gives us leverage. Maybe that player will sign for less knowing that there's less dollars on the table available

as opposed to negotiating them with sort of a clean cap slate. So there's a lot of different ways it can go. And it, you know, it all comes down to, like you said, your organizational priorities of what you value, who you value. You know, are you a team and a management group? in an ownership group that likes, you know, dealing with uncertainty because it opens up a bunch of new, you know, avenues that might allow you to make some interesting moves

you'd otherwise wouldn't have thought of. Or you're a team who really wants to lock things down and, you know, take sort of the unknowns off the table. And you're seeing that a little bit, I think, this offseason where, you know, you hear various sort of reports and analyses that say, wow, you know, let's look at Carolina, for example, here's a team with so many UFAs coming up. that's going to be really scary.

They're going to lose all these players. I remember having a discussion with someone in the media about that. And I sort of said, well, hold back a second. You know, first of all, you're not really losing a player who's the UFC. That's just a player whose contract's done. I'm still a little different. But also, there you might be, hey, this is super exciting. We can do anything for like that, you know, family guy episode

where it's like, do you want the boat or do you want the mystery box? They might want that mystery box. Like, we can sign any player around the league who might come up in the next few weeks versus like we have $4 million to use judiciously. So a lot of different ways to look at it. A lot of it depends on where you are, you know, lifestyle, sorry, life cycle of your team meaning, you know, are you happy with the way things are going?

Do you think you just need a couple more steps? Do you have the same management and coaching sort of regime in place as a season before? Or do you have some different pushes and pulls going on that maybe you want to take some bigger and different swings? Well, it's interesting you bring that up because I still maintain that cap space is one of the sort of biggest and most misunderstood assets in the NHL, right? Maybe we'll see how those dynamics change with it, hopefully going up by these like $4 million increments year by year,

and that'll be great and that'll change the dynamics. But especially during these years where it was kind of flat and teams were getting caught in these precarious positions where they were essentially just having a giveaway players for free just to make stuff work and budget accordingly. We got into this spot where, and you see this more in the NBA, I think more than the NHL, where everyone is just so preoccupied with filling out their roster in the first week of July, right? It's almost as if you want to have names that you want to be able to introduce to the media and take

pictures and be able to sort of promote us. Look, we brought these guys in, our team set. You can look at our depth chart. This is what we're going to work with heading into the season. When we know that what really matters for a lot of these teams is what that team looks like in March, around a deadline or even in April heading into the postseason, you start. certainly have to get there and you don't want to take that for granted for a lot of teams where we see there's volatility in the standings and it's not a given that you're just going to make the playoffs every year. But if you are in a certain position, I sometimes think teams and organizations kind of limit their upside, I guess, or box themselves into a corner by just as soon as money

opens up, they just immediately spend it. And then they get into a position where they wind up wishing they had more flexibility to make moves. And I guess that's the concept of opportunity cost, right? But that's sort of what you're alluding to there with the idea of having your own UFA's heading into an offseason where, yeah, you don't necessarily want to just lose them for nothing, especially if they're valuable pieces of your organization. And, you know, it's kind of scary to get into a bidding war on the open market, especially if you're, let's say, a smaller market team like Carolina is. But at the same time, it presents you with this opportunity where you can basically do whatever you want and remodel your team or go out and add in different areas. And I think that's scary, but also I think pretty exciting, assuming your organization is in the right hands. Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, I think it's exciting if you can position yourself to sort of say, if a generational player becomes available,

are we going to be able to put ourselves in a spot to go after that player, regardless of who they may be and where they may be? And, you know, listen, there's a few different ways you can do that. One way you talked about is, you know, for keeping those chairs open as opposed to maybe sign players earlier versus later, That's certainly one way to do it. It has the cost. You know, another way is simply to be really judicious and strategic with signing players, you know, to significant term and salary in a way where you can sit back and say, you know, is this, you know, you don't want to sign a player like a new car where you say the day after the signing,

you can't trade it and lose it a bunch of its value. You want to maybe be a little smarter and say, hey, you know, we do have a lot of cap space committed, perhaps, but we've committed it to really good players who we, you know, made those bets early enough on that we have them locked into good numbers for good term so that if that, you know, generational player that we really want is out there, we won't have trouble flipping, you know, say a couple of $5 million players to other teams at a reasonable cost as opposed to, say, you know, locking a player up to mega term and mega salary once you've realized how proven they are and maybe having a little more difficulty finding a partner to open up that flexibility.

So, you know, different ways to look at it. But I think you're right, you're seeing that more and more where teams are maybe being a little more patient or taking those big swings as opposed to, you know, being conservative and making sure they're good as opposed to, you know, leaving that opportunity becoming great. Well, for the sake of being topical, what we've seen this week with the Pierluke Dubois trade by the Kings, and there's many ways to take this. And I don't necessarily want to turn this to a big deep dive of that, but I think just because it's kind of a current event.

It also highlights a lot of these concepts we're talking about where the Kings were such a fascinating organization for me for a while there because it's this big desirable market, right? They were sort of this up-and-coming young organization. They had a bunch of caps base. They had either a bunch of draft capital or prospects that they'd picked high that were valued around the league. And it felt like anyone you talked to, they were sort of loading up to be this organization

that was able to sort of pounce and benefit on the next. big disgruntled star, right? A young player who either got disenchanted with her organization or just wanted to go to a bigger market and LA would appeal to them. And they could have gone in a number of ways. It felt like they sort of really keyed in on pure Luke Dubois. He expressed obviously mutual interest in going there while he was in Winnipeg. And it felt like a given, right? And then they sort of did everything they possibly could to facilitate that and made that happen. and in the meantime, I'm not sure what the disconnect was there, and the player certainly isn't blameless by any means.

I think he's got quite a few flaws as a player, but it seemed like they had no real plan for what they were going to do once they acquired him, right? It seemed like almost all of their agenda just walked up to the line of, all right, we just got to get this guy. And then there was no sort of planning or thought to what happens after. And so you bring him in, you're playing this style that doesn't really make sense for the way he's playing.

He's playing down the depth chart with role players. And so, of course, he's not going to succeed. And now I think they got made fun of a lot at the time of the trade because it was like, all right, they moved all this stuff to get him. And then they moved him essentially as a cap dump to bring in a goalie who's going to be, at best, a veteran timeshare option for them. But what that move at least did, I think theoretically was created space for them to once again be a player in the market once a guy like that becomes available.

And so we'll see if they've learned their lesson in that way or if they kind of time it better or use it more strategically. but I think it's kind of a cautionary tale, but it's also a fascinating development for me because a lot of this stuff that we're talking about really played out before our very eyes over the past couple years with them. Yeah, I mean, it's an interesting example,

and I don't sort of have the inside lead on what works and what didn't. Obviously, it's a great young player who I remember that series with Columbus in Toronto where if you watch that, you would have, you know, like L.A., probably been pretty high on his potential in any situation. but to your point and sort of tying it back to the conversation we're having,

you know, if you look at what you said, you know, they want to position themselves to have the space to take a big swing at a young player with mega upside to take them over the top. So they took that swing. This time it didn't work out, obviously. But it sort of dives into the like the thinking of, you know, to use a baseball analogy. You know, if you want to focus on batting average or slugging percentage. And what I mean by that is, you know, a team like LA or anything could say, hey, let's, let's evaluate ourselves based on did we make 10 good decisions. So we sign a bunch of sort of conservative debt players, you know, to conservative role.

So, you know, your typical third, fourth line, two, three million dollar players. And they fit the role and you can sit back and say, hey, that worked out. Wow, we're eight for eight. They were all pretty okay. That's one way to look at team building. The other way is to say, you know, we need those giant grand slams. So, you know, use a baseball analogy or, you know, another similar analogy would be if you look at for investing or venture capital. You don't really evaluate your returns as a company as, hey, we invested in 15 startups who all doubled.

You're really focusing on like, did we find that one Google or that one Amazon or that one Nvidia or whatever that made us like 50,000 times their money? And at the end of the day, that one decision dwarfs like 100 decent small bets, right? And so I think that's how LA is sort of thinking about it and thought about it. And, you know, maybe the next swing they take for a Dubois type player, if it's, you know, similar fact pattern, different player, that might take them from being like a perennial, you know, decent chance of being a playoff team to a team that's in that upper, you know, upper upper, upper echelon of an elite team who's going to compete for the cup year after year. And that's not necessarily a crazy way to think about things. No, no, I think it's the right way to think about any things. Obviously, whether it's successful or not is going to come down to a variety of things. but I think just nailing those big decisions is going to be one of the biggest drivers of it.

Okay, let's get back to then. So we got the sort of operations, right, in terms of, let's say you've identified the players you want, you have a list together. What's the next step in terms of the sort of communication that goes into place? Because I imagine, especially whether you're dealing with an executive on another team about a player they have via trade or even an agent, once you get into the negotiating period with UFAs, you certainly want to make your intentions known in the sense that you make yourself, viable as a potential partner and landing spot. And so you want to keep the conversation going. But I imagine you also don't want to give away all potential future leverage by being overly

eager and kind of expressing too much interest. How does that sort of work in terms of those negotiations, whether it's with an executive or an agent in terms of you're talking about one of their clients and you're expressing interest, but you also want to make sure that you're not just kind of giving away the full hand that you're holding. Sure. So why don't we start with the negotiating window? Because I think that's an area where the least exciting piece about that is this whole concept of like you can't talk about salary because the answer is, as everyone knows, of course, you can effectively get to the same point and talk about salary. Meaning, you know, you can call an agent for a player and say, hey, we really like Dimitri.

You know, we think you'd be a good fit here. What does Dimitri think? And the agent's going to say, well, you know, Demetri thinks he's a really good player. He's sort of like Jeff Skinner or so and so. You say, okay, well, we think he's like Jeff Skinner, but he's maybe a little bit more like, you know, some other player. And, you know, there's a million ways to say the same thing to get to a salary idea of the range you're talking about

committing to the player where there's that mutual understanding. And everyone knows that because that like 12-0-1 and 0 seconds. On UFAA day, everyone magically has agreed to terms, which they don't do in like a four second window. That's the unexciting part and sort of uninteresting because you can get to the result without much fancy thinking and fancy talking. But what's interesting, I think, is sort of the soft power element of it and the conveying of other messages during that window,

which in a lot of situations can have a really profound impact, I think, on what players decide and also our teams decide. And I think back to 2016, summer when we were looking at a few UFAs at a couple of players we were really high on, one of whom obviously was Jonathan Marchesil. And, you know, the contract we signed him to wasn't mind-blowing. It was a two-year deal. It was guaranteed.

And it was a one-way deal, which at the time was a decent sort of step up from what he made before. But what got them, I think, to really commit to signing with us early on and buying in was we set up a meeting with Marchy and we did with Colton Severe where we sat down with the players and actually got our owners to their credit

like Vinnie Viola sat down at brunch with the players at a cooler restaurant at the Lower East Side in New York and we sat down with three of us and our owner directly told these players like we really see a spot for you on this team as a major contributor

and we are really high on you and I'm telling you that directly as an owner and I'm sitting here with, you know, some, our management team who is new, but the fact that they're sitting next to me and I'm talking to you sort of tells you that, you know, their word is my word. That's sort of the authority of what they're telling you. That is legit. And I think that made like a significant impact on those players to have those meetings and

have someone, you know, that senior and that's significant to say, my personal time is, you know, best spent right now talking to you. you know, you're not an afterthought. You're not just sort of another depth signing. You're someone who we've invested a significant time on and know a lot about and are interested in bringing here. So I think conversations like that,

and it really depends obviously on, you know, what team and what management and what experience they have in relationships with the Asian player. But talks like that can be helpful. And I think in certain situations can certainly be differentiators that go above and beyond just sort of, you know,

like you said, talking about a salary with an agent for five days before the UFA window gets shut and you can start signing players. Well, I was going to say that's an interesting example. I think people would be very surprised by that. Maybe they shouldn't be, right? Because after all, like we think of these players as salary figures and sort of their contributions on the ice, but everyone is a human, right?

And you kind of have the same sort of like interests or desires. and one of those is just kind of the organization making you feel wanted and appreciated and integral to the plans, especially long-term ones, like how you're going to use me, what you're going to do with me, what that's going to look like. And another example, we'll see obviously how it winds up playing out. But with the same Panthers organization, I think people will probably be surprised once Sam Ryan Hart's contract gets done, assuming it gets done with them, what that figure is. And there's a variety of reasons for it from the taxes to playing with Barakoff, a lot of inherent

advantages for the Panthers. but I think one of them is they clearly make him feel very wanted and appreciated, right? And I think he's even been on the record previously in his first team with Buffalo. I think he would have signed there for long term if they had done so. And there was always an indecision because the team was bad. And it was, all right, who's to blame? We can't really commit to any of these people here because they're clearly not part of the answer. And so he never felt that.

And he, I think he's been very vocal and open about it since his time in Florida. and that's sort of obviously a different example and maybe a slightly larger scale one considering the money involved and where he's at in his career. But I think similar concepts apply to that. And that's one of countless examples around the league that you could probably point to as sort of a similar phenomenon.

Yeah, that's definitely right. And like the easy way to see how right your analysis there is is to invert it, right? And say, you know, not players who are happy might sign for less, but simply flip it and say, you know, you make a player really unhappy, and he's not going to sign even if you offer him more, which everyone would agree would,

you know, most likely be true in a lot of situations. So, yeah, certainly there's, you know, different interests at play beyond just term and money guys want the right fit. And that comes into play in the free agent window. And to your point, you know, players are humans with families. And, you know, I think a good team recruiting a player often will, you know, show them a lot about what their family life would be like. I know a lot of teams do that.

They have, you know, I'm even thinking way back, you know, we made sure. sure to do that, having presentations about local schools and, you know, local real estate and stuff like that. All those things are, you know, super relevant and super, you know, helpful and definitely, you know, not irrelevant, I think, as part of the process. Let's put a pin in the free agent part of this because I think there's a lot of stuff to unpack there and we'll get to it. But just, we're going sort of stepwise here, it feels like the draft and in particular draft combine is sort of the next, uh, the next segue for us here because that's one way. where you get a congregation of various people from around the league, right?

You get some initial talks going, maybe some ideas, some feelers that are sent out. And you also obviously get to sort of get testing done on the players. Maybe you're with an organization that has a very vested interest because you either are picking high or looking to trade up or you're just getting more intel and information on these guys that might matter for you down the road. But I'm kind of curious about that whole thing, right? because on the one hand, a lot of it gets dismissed because it's like, you know, the whole Sam Bennett thing about how many pull-ups he is able to do and all this stuff. It's, it gets overblown.

And I think the actual sort of statistical testing itself might not be nearly as relevant as some people might make it out to be. But also, I think just the information you're getting along the way that goes beyond those few metrics here or there is actually very important to an organization. So I'm kind of curious if you've got any either combine stories or kind of like relevant anecdotes. about how things start at that point in the schedule? I do have a combine anecdote, and I'll get to that in a second. What might also be interesting, and you know, you allude to this a bit is there's a lot of different ways teams

handle the combine ranging from how much they focus on sending personnel. Some teams have one or two people in the room for interviews, going to what kind of questions they ask, and obviously what kind of way they put into, like you said, physical metrics interviews and the like. We did a lot of work when I was in Florida, myself and Eric Joyce, sort of putting together a new way at the time of sort of how to approach the combine, and we relied a lot on one of our amateur sales at the time,

actually named Mike Fairman, who was a storied hockey player at West Point and then became an amateur scale for us. And Mike has done a lot of work in behavioral psychology. And so he put together an interview bank, where his thinking was rather than letting every interview sort of be dictated by the prospect, meaning if a prospect walks in and, you know, the scouts or management know the player or their family or their coaches, they sort of ask a different line of questioning than maybe a player they don't know as well. And it's hard to compare apples to oranges in that way.

You know, Mike put together really a behavioral data bank of questions that would apply no matter who the prospect was. And really similar to the kind of questions, actually, he had asked at interviews at places, you know, like Amazon that are just like, tell me a time when you struggled or tell me a time when you overcame adversity. Something like that, you know, whether that in the end helps you figure out, you know, what players have the attributes that will make them successful NHL players years down the road, you know, who's to say? Just there is a lot of different ways to look at it.

And, you know, a lot of different approaches to how teams go about their work at the combine. ironically, despite all that high-level psychological analysis and question development that I just alluded to, I think the most heated I ever saw a combine room wasn't related to any interesting question like that. But sort of the strongest combine memory I have is when we were interviewing in 2016, a young player from Minnesota named Riley Tufti, and after his interview, there was a heated back and forth between or two of the folks in our room about whether or not Riley Tuffy at age 18 was larger or smaller in weight than Nick Bukstad, who of course was an organization and also was from Minnesota and had been to Minnesota Mr. Hockey, whether Bukstad was bigger or smaller than Tuffy at the same time in their junior careers and that devolved into a rather famous chair throwing match within our Combine interview room. was sort of the fun, crazy combine anecdote that I can recall.

But other than that, it is a, you know, it's a fun, interesting week. And, you know, it's in the playoffs. It's near the draft. It's near free agency. And so in between sort of watching 18-year-olds do pull-ups to your example, you're also having, you know, sit down with other teams. And, you know, I recall a couple trades we made at the combine. And you're sort of doing that information gathering, you know, for a free agency and everything

else at the same time. what's better than guys being dudes are arguing about our prospects wait and throwing chairs dudes rock all right steve let's uh let's take a break here and then when we come back we'll jump right back in it we'll keep talking about the offseason from a team perspective and sort of the preparation and process for that you're listening to the hockey ptio cast streaming on the sports net radio network all right we're back here on the hockey ptodias of stewarder steve um before we went to break we were talking about the draft combine and that obviously naturally leads us into the draft itself during your time with the Panthers. I think one of the lasting legacies was the computer boys and your guys pursuit

of kind of integrating statistical models into scouting and providing a bit more nuance and more quantifiable information. And that certainly I think permeated into the league much more so over the years now and teams have started to adopt those methods and various forms of evaluation. Do you have any other stories from that time around the draft and sort of how all of that was unfolding, kind of utilization of it, I guess, where we're at now. If you have any other sort of either lasting impressions or kind of like things that you think are the future for the sport when it comes to the draft, because it is, you know, I think we've gotten better as a whole in terms of understanding the importance of like ages and

certain factors that matter more than others. But it is still a relative sort of unknown when it comes to evaluating 18 year olds and not knowing necessarily how they're going to develop or who's going to look like what by the time they're 25. So I think it's a very interesting topic, but it's also one that's, you know, complicated for a variety of reasons just because of our lack of, I guess, actual information. Yeah, I mean, I give you the quick history of sort of how we got to where we got to that you're sort of referring to back then, you know, I think it was around the 2014, 15 draft

where our ownership, you know, came to me and said, hey, you know, we want to sort of think a little differently about how we go about gathering information for the draft and drafting players. Not at all a knock sort of on what the team had been doing historically, but just sort of identifying there had been, you know, maybe some gaps in terms of, you know, geographical representation and otherwise, and how we went about, you know, selecting prospects and so on.

And so, you know, myself and Eric Joyce and a few others got to work on sort of thinking, you know, what can we do to maybe supplement the eyes and years of traditional scouts? And one thing we leaned heavily on was just, you know, looking through, you know, historic performance and anything else and saying, you know, what indicators does it look like there's been, you know, in the past and historically with young prospects that might predict your future success, objectively. And among a few other things we did, we came about a couple guys who were anonymously writing a prospect blog with some really interesting insights out of your hometown of Vancouver. I think, and Cam Lawrence and Josh Wisebuck, and Eric and I got to know them and brought them in and incorporated a lot of their really interesting draft predictive insights, which were, you know, neat and of themselves, but also a really cool counterbalance to work alongside traditional scouting to get to some real interesting discussions that would help us, you know, fill in gaps on both sides.

And that was a really interesting time for us. You know, did a lot of new things, sort of watched as Cam and Josh refined their work as they got some firsthand exposure to, you know, long-term or long-time traditional scouts. And we had some really, really interesting discussions. And, you know, the irony, of course, is, you know, mentioned computer boys, the perception maybe that we were, you know, analytics driven and that led to, you know, how we went about our drafts. And while that's partially true, the irony, of course, is our, you know, first draft with that. crew, at least at the draft table and on the sort of the background, was 2016. And the story of

the 2016 draft where we made our selection of Henrik Wurstrom was actually an example of sort of a more holistic approach where, you know, that pick and some of our other picks that draft were hugely influenced by our, you know, traditional, traditional scouts who had seen a player on the ground in that instance, a player in a, you know, second tier sort of finished junior league without a track record that you could objectively rely on, but the scouts who had seen them had this incredible personal track record of identifying players

and sort of being at the table for players in the past, not identifying, but, you know, knowing how great there would be for players like Alexander Barkov, and, you know, he took a bit of a holistic approach and, and leaning on that information as well. So it was a really neat time, a lot of interesting discussions, interesting debates, and

certainly to your point, it's only evolved since then to with, you know, guys like Cam and Josh and others, and you know, Sunny Mehta, who's in Florida now, doing some really interesting work, you know, and driving some new thoughts forward. Eric Borges, I'm sorry, the artist, what could have been? I was a big fan of his as a prospect, certainly. Okay, let's get into trades a little bit here.

And then as we segue into free agency as well, because I think that's going to be a big interest to listeners. I guess a question I have for you is the utilization of no trade clauses or no move clauses, It feels like it's becoming increasingly prevalent, especially in terms of the types of players who are now warranting them or earning them as part of like a leverage ploy or negotiating tactic by them in terms of, and it makes sense, right? You want to have control over where you're going to play and maybe you take a bit less than you would on the AV front to get that privilege. It also becomes with a bunch of risk as well along the way from the team side. But I'm curious for your take on that and then sort of just the process of, no trade clauses when it comes to like the paperwork, right?

Of submitting, filing, like checking who's on whose list and kind of the process maybe even of fishing around whether a player would be willing to waive, whether it's a player that's on your team or whether it's someone you're looking to acquire and if you're potentially the team that you're representing is on it to kind of gauge the interest of whether they'd be willing to come play for you. Sure. So when I started doing this work, you know, one of my super strongly, held beliefs was you can't negotiate salary or salary in term for a player without also finalizing whether or not there's a no move or no trade and also finalizing like when and how that money

is paid. And the reason I say that is because those other factors have a massive impact at a massive economic cost at the end of the day on the actual value of that contract, meaning what can you do with it and how quickly you can monetize it if you have to get out of it. And that in turn affects how much you should be willing to spend on those basic inputs of salary and term. And, you know, to your point, how they get filed with the league, how they get done. That part isn't too complex. You know, there's some guard rails around what you can and can't agree to. In terms of no move and no trade, but you typically finalize, you know, how many teams can a player list and in what years of his contract. And there's, you know, obviously very massive implications

to how those get ridden, both in terms of a when they can be leveraged, meaning if a player signed for a, you know, his UFA years during which he can have a no move and no trade in any of those years, as opposed to a restricted creation. You can't. You know, it's very important when those, you know, no trade and no move years kick in. If they're right away earlier in the deal, well, then you can sort of move out of that contract at will. And if they're really backdated in the deal, you know, then you have to wait. And you really want to make sure you have as big a list of possible to trade that player without him having control over where he wants to go because ultimately it can function as a veto.

If a player says, for example, I want a five-team trade list of only, you know, five-teens all be traded to. Well, if you're trying to move that player at the deadline and that player for whatever reason doesn't want to be moved, he might say, okay, here's my list. It's five teams who are well out of the playoffs and not spending any money this year, in which case you're sort of handcuffed. So that's an important consideration. And again, very important nuance that are right.

You can have a trade list or a no trade list. So a trade list would function as saying, you know, a player can designate in the third to fifth year of his contract 10 teams that he will agree to be traded to. Well, no trade obviously is, you know, the player can say you won't be traded to X number of teams. And again, depending on how things go, those can play out differently and can be leveraged. And then there's all these other little inputs in terms of things like timing,

like when can the player make that designation, when do they need to provide and update the list? And those all come into play in terms of, you know, helping you figure out certainty of, can you move the player, how early do you know what the market is? And there's just, you know, depending on how high profile the player is, there's a massive impact. because, of course, other teams know, you know, how much flexibility you have or how, you know, how under the gun you are from the player and, of course, this agent, depending on how you've structured those no moves and no trades, which is why you have to be really selective. And for where you give them out, how you give them out, and, you know, where you think that player

will be in his career arc at the time, those provisions come into play. How do you feel about, you know, we were talking earlier before the break about certain examples of just the organization sort of making a player feel wanted, right? And kind of the sort of impact that can have on making them want to actually be there themselves. We see a lot of especially this time of year. And it's always, I get a chuckle out of it, right? Because I think I've gotten pretty good at sort of reading the tea leaves on when insiders are tweeting out certain things about, you know, whether it's from a team level or a player level and kind of who that message is coming from. Do you have any thoughts on sort of the art, oh, I guess, of

of negotiating publicly or not necessarily negotiating, but kind of like, you know, strategically having messages come out and sort of managing what does and what doesn't come out, right? Because we've seen certain organizations are very good at essentially keeping everything in house. And whenever they make a move, it's coming out of left field in the sense

that it's probably their official team account, like tweeting it out and you're not actually getting hints of it from insiders leading up to that moment. And then there's certain organizations where they're just so much noise where you're pretty much, you feel like you're actually getting a front row seat for everything that's happening along the way. Not necessarily the one is right or wrong or might even make that big of a difference, but do you even kind of takes on sort of that concept and sort of the utilization, I guess,

of public voices and media and sort of how that can impact things this time of year? I think it depends so much on so many things in terms of what team we're talking about, certain managers operate in certain ways. Some of them have long-standing close relationships with certain media figures. And it's just they're like, you know, they want to tell them because they're their friends and they're expecting, you know, some sort of nice reciprocal treatment down the line. And so that's why they do it. Sometimes it's out of self-interest like that.

You know, other times, you know, agents can use it, I think, more effectively than teams. I'm not sure how much it helps teams to sort of leak things publicly, whereas if an agent really wants to drive up for that public reception of my guy wants out, which isn't necessarily great in the player's interest. And again, depends on the strength of the management team you're dealing with. But you can certainly create a media storm. And if you know, you know, the ownership group of the team you're dealing with doesn't like media storms like that. Well, then sure, it might help expedite trades being made.

I think the effect, like, again, it really depends on the team because some teams are very strategically structured where the general manager or the president say, hey, listen, I know agents can become really difficult and take up a lot of time and pick up the phone calling us 24-7. I'm going to remove myself from that part of the job. And there's GMs who do that who say, you know what, I don't want that to be the bread and butter of my existence because I have difficulty saying no or I have difficulty sort of, you know, getting out of that contentious phone call. in a way that's maybe constructed to my team. So I'll hand that off. And there's various people within the org who might be better suited to that. And it lets the GM or the president maybe focus on, you know, whatever bigger picture things they want to do and just provide high level advice.

And there's other GMs who might pick up every agent call and really be, you know, impacted by every whim of, you know, my guy's unhappy. And if you don't move them by today or tomorrow, we're going to, you know, go public. So different ways to manage it. end of the day, you know, no surprise. I think, you know, good teams operate in which in the dust-longroom interests of the club and try to tune out the noise. But, you know, as you're sort of alluding to, and as we've all seen, it's much easier

said than done. All right. So I can't remember exactly if we got into this last time or how much we talked about it. I think we sort of at least touched on the subject of Barkov and Hubert O and kind of that period of time and in Panthers history of the contracts they signed and kind of how all that lined up. I think it's a really interesting. interesting topic for us to get into more so here now, especially with free agency around the

corner and with extensions coming up for teams and how they sort of line all this stuff up from years down the road perspective, especially now with this idea of the cap's going to be going up. And every year, there's going to be more pieces of the pie available, I guess. If you're a player, if you're an agent representing a star player, you're probably looking at that and you're salivating it the idea that with each year of the company, up, you're going to be able to cash in more, right? And you're going to be able to command a larger piece of that. Everyone's income is going to go up accordingly. From a team perspective, sort of balancing that now and being able to talk players into signing long term off of their

ELCs or if they've taken a bridge on their second deal as their third deal into their late 20s is such an interesting concept to me because I think there's been, certainly it's been well established now that a player's prime in their most productive and valuable years are probably earlier than we initially thought, right? It's probably more so that early to mid-20s range as opposed to late 20s, early 30s. So how do you sort of from a team perspective, I guess, get players on board to sign long-term and kind of not give away those years, but essentially at least allow you to buy them up at a reasonable rate while you still can, as opposed to having to do it down the line when they're probably going to have more leverage. I think that's sort of dynamic

between player versus team. There's obviously risk and reward involved for both parties. But I think as the cap goes up, that's going to be an interesting to see. We've certainly seen it in the NBA, right, this constant player empowerment, players betting on themselves by taking shorter term deal so they can cash in down the line as the cap goes up. We haven't necessarily seen that much of that in the NHL. And it's certainly a much more risk involved sport, right, with how chaotic and how dangerous it can be and how easily you can get hurt. And your earning power can essentially just slip away from you. But I'm curious if you think that is something we're going to see more of,

whether these conversations are going to be had and kind of what the impact of that is going to be like from a team perspective, being able to retain their star players on these seven, eight-year deals off of their ELCs. So let me tell you a story that sort of touches on most of what you just referred to in terms of How does the team get a player for a bunch of years? We know players are in their prime in their mid-20s, and how does the player decide to commit to a contract like that in their second type of contract? And I think the story that's sort of an example of someone thinking about all those factors the way they should is Todd Diamond, who's Sasha Barker's agent and is still Sasha's agent now.

you know, when I sat down with Todd to do Sasha's second contracts of coming off of his entry level year, when everyone knew he would, you know, he would be great and it was just a matter of how great and how high the cap would go. When I sat down and it was, you know, pretty transparent, simple conversation of we love the player, we want to lock him in as long as we can and we know we will have to and are willing to pay him, you know, reasonably top of market. Now reasonably top of market at that time, given where the market was, way back when with players like Nathan McKinnon was around $6 million a year on a five or six-year deal.

And we ended up, you know, 5.9 by 6 on the deal. But the way Todd thought about it, I think, is what touches on what you're saying. You know, he looked at me and he said, Sasha wants to take care of his family and himself. He wants long-term security. he wants to commit to the team. He's not someone who's focused on maximizing every last penny. He wants to be happy and he wants to win. And so we do want a long-term deal.

But I'm going to do my job, this is Todd speaking today. And I'm going to make sure we also don't go beyond six years and give him any more term. And here's why. Because he's going to come off that deal on a six year and he'll be around 28. And if he's 28, he's going to get another massive contract. And I'll be positioning him, even though we might leave another $10 million on the table if we go a little longer, he'll be positioned to maximize his career earnings exponentially better being a 28-year-old than being a 30-year-old. So I don't care what you guys offer us on an eight-year-or.

I think maybe you can go beyond seven at the time or whatever it was, but I'm not going to let him go past six unless he tells me I have to. And he was 100% right. And, you know, we ended up doing that six-year deal, which was a great. for the team and good enough for the player. And it positioned him at 28, you know, to sign his third sort of generational money type of deal where he locked himself in now for, you know, whatever he's at, around $10 million for the next eight or so years. So that's a good example of a balance of how does, you know, a team who knows a player

is great to say we want the player long term and the agents and the players saying, well, we're not going to go short term because there's risk and we want to, you know, commit to the team and allow them to build. But we also don't want to be taking, you know, massive amounts of money off the table and sacrificing potential future income with a good compromise. Yeah. The other, you mentioned Huberto. I think Huberto, like his contract, and I did this third contract with Alan Walsh.

His second contract was just a short-term two-year bridge. I think I want to say it's around 3.5 million. Someone listening, I'm sure will keep me honest. You know, his is an example, and his was also 5.9 by 6, the same. same as Sashes, even though it was a three, a third contract rather than a second. But the way we thought about that internally, we were negotiating that. And it's tricky, right, from a management standpoint and self-interest is you can look at sort of the team's strategy at that point, you know, in a self-interested way or more so as a

fiduciary. And when I say that, I mean, you know, if you sign a player in that position to a three-year deal versus a six-year deal, you're getting him for less A.A.V. and it's tempting to just say from the outside, well, yeah, but you get him for less years and the next contract will be hired. But you're also giving yourself like a three or four year window with way more money to spend on other players. And if you're in management and you don't have indefinite job security and that's your focus as sort of a rational human being, you might be tempted to be at least a little predisposed to maybe going shorter on those bridge or third. contracts to keep some money off the table that you can use for other players to help you win

in those next two or three years. And that's something we talked about with our owners with Hubergo where we said, you know, listen, we could do that and that will help us. But the right, you know, decision sort of acting in the best interest of owners is to sign this player for as long as possible, knowing he's a high end player, knowing he'll be worth more and more money, and knowing having him for six years at a really good number is going to be far more valuable then three years at a lower number, even though in the short term we'll have a little less money on the table. And this also goes back full circle to your questions about no trade and no move, because that's the great example of a contract where Huberto had a no trade and no move

in the middle of his contract. He didn't at the end. And so you had that combination of, you know, that sixth year and the lack of a, you know, extensive no move for no trade. And obviously the, you know, management of that time was able to take that long. longer term flexible contract and package that as part of the deal to Calgary for Matthew to Chuck, which in the long term window of looking at the team obviously helped them a lot more than sort of saving a couple million dollars on a short term deal. Yeah, I mean, it certainly did. That's really fascinating stuff, Matt.

I'm glad we got to do this. We're out of time, unfortunately. I've got so many other things that I wanted to get into with you. We're going to have to maybe do a part three at some point here because we still have so much meat on the bone. and I'm sure the listeners are going to be messaging in when this is up and telling us how much they love it because it was a great chat and sort of information that I think isn't really accessible in a lot of other places. So I'm glad we got to do this. Thank you for taking the time out of your busy schedule, man.

We'll have you on again soon and I'm already looking forward to that. Thank you to the listeners for listening to us. We'll be back with plenty more fun offseason content over the next couple days and weeks here on the HockeyPedio cast streaming on the Sports Night Radio Network.