The roster as a vector — with a value and a direction
There is nothing wrong with viewing time as an exhaustible resource among other resources such as Draft Picks, Draft Power, Cap Space, Wage Expenditure, etc.
Contrary to how most NHL teams seem to operate, there is a hidden dimension behind every move —it is time, also known as decay, atrophy, entropy, etc.
Whatever you want to call it, it is inevitable and relentless and it lays an enormous shadow over everything.
Time brings with it randomness and chance. It’s the Bright Future to look forward to, and the bitter Dark Ages to quickly look past. Despite the inevitability of time, it doesn’t seem like many NHL managers view their combined assets as vectors with a value and a direction through time. Furthermore, despite the general trend of preferring and valuing younger players, so many NHL teams are working against their own interests with big-money contracts tied up to declining veterans for performances already rendered… in the past.
Paying for past performance is a topic wholly unto itself but another issue with time is that many clubs figure that the future will be brighter, more successful, more productive than the present — so they more-or-less bet against their present selves in a variety of ways.
So while GMs view specific players with an eye on their age and trajectory, they don’t seem to view their combined roster with the same criteria. And that is strange to me, because how else do you know your team is nearly there enough to spend assets acquiring the final pieces?
What if next season is derailed?
An unavoidable fact with professional hockey today is that it is a physical sport with guaranteed contracts. It is inevitable that some important and expensive players can get massively injured and left out of action in any given year or at any given time. Injuries to key players leave their clubs with no choice but to hope they recover in time for the next year.
There is simply nothing that can be done once a key player goes down.
At the same time there seems to be a persistent urban legend, the so called “competitive window” where everything is meant to fall into place and a team with its various, differently-aged players and cap hits are meant to make a deep playoff run (or several) and hit some sort of competitive climax before that roster’s make-up falls apart.
If one or two injuries can offset the whole so-called “competitive window”, then clearly the whole concept of competitive windows was fluid to begin with. I don’t believe in competitive windows very much.
Let’s put aside those catastrophic and major injuries to significant players.
What if there’s a persistent injury bug that compromises performances and eventually burns through the players’ trust in the coach and the organization’s seemingly perfect plan to win?
What if there are a few bad reactions or bad turns, or hell, even bad bounces, along the way and suddenly everything is topsy turvy and a promising team finds itself on the outside of the playoff picture?
While we always have to plan with one eye on the future, for the reasons listed above, it seems to me the present is a far more reliable dance partner.
I Won’t Mortgage The Future - the Marc Bergevin Story
Former Montreal Canadiens General Manager Marc Bergevin would often manage his audience’s expectations by repeating the phrase “I won’t mortgage the future”. This was a line that was imprinted upon the media so well that the usual suspects in the media would since utilize it often and liberally and eventually without it even being prompted by Bergevin himself.
Bergevin’s boss, Montreal Canadiens owner Geoff Molson, used the line when he praised the moves Bergevin made after the historically bad 2015-2016 season where the Habs started very hot and then got derailed with a single injury to Carey Price.
We acknowledged above that impact players are irreplaceable on short notice. But should a season be pretty much abandoned because one player goes down?
In that season, Bergevin didn’t try to replace his star goaltender with any NHL goaltender or back up… and the team cratered across the board in Goals Scored, Chances Created, Chances Conceded, and of course Goals Conceded.
By not firing the coach, Michel Therrien, who allowed his team to fall apart in all facets, even those unrelated to goaltending, and not replacing Carey Price with anyone better than a low-tier AHL goaltender (Ben Scrivens!) Bergevin bet against his team’s current season.
A season that started with much promise and murmurs of another Norris Trophy for star defenseman PK Subban was effectively abandoned and aborted by January 2016. That season, predictably, the Habs didn’t win a single playoff round as they missed the playoffs.
What happened the next season? In the 2016-2017 season, the Habs didn’t win a single playoff round.
What happened the season after? In the 2017-2018 season, the Habs had traded away the 9th overall draft pick they chose in 2016 (Mikhail Sergachev) for Jonathan Drouin… and the Habs didn’t win a single playoff round as they missed the playoffs.
In the 2018-2019 season, the Habs didn’t win a single playoff round as they missed the playoffs.
In the 2019-2020 season, despite beating the Penguins in a cocked up Covid play-ins, the Habs didn’t win a single playoff round.
Not one playoff round win in the five seasons that took place since Bergevin allegedly didn’t mortgage the future. Is it really a safe or reasonable decision to bet against yourself in such a way?
For a GM whose other refrain was “anything can happen [in the playoffs]” he surely didn’t try to assemble a consistent playoff team and didn’t try to salvage the expenditure of the only thing that is unrecoverable: time.
To consider Time when building a competitive team
The conclusion to the above is straightforward: incorporate time (age, age profile of key players, etc.) in the assessment of your roster and use that enriched analysis to guide moves and transactions to come.
A player drafted at t=0 takes at least two full seasons in the NHL to become a reliable and relied-upon impact player in his third year at t=3. This is for a top-tier player, often drafted high and early in the entry draft and often requiring little seasoning in the lower leagues. So at least two and likely at least three seasons until they become a known commodity and impact player at the NHL level.
For lower 1st round picks and below, it takes anywhere up to five years or more until a manager can predictably enjoy their impact on their roster. In five years there is a lot of player turnover, and there are many niggling injuries, physical breakdowns, contract disputes, and other factors that help dismantle a roster’s core. Entropy.
It is for this reason that most good teams draft the Best Player Available (BPA) and not for immediate or near-future positional need.1 Drafting the BPA ensures the current GM and any future GM has the best chance at having the highest possible value asset.
Given parity, the draft system and lottery, the salary cap floor and other factors, no team is ever totally lacking good assets to build around at any time. A team that wishes to be competitive asap should have a tight timeline to get the new player-assets they need, otherwise, the assets they start with and have on hand can go bust (or injured, or lost somehow) and the team will remain incomplete and uncompetitive. They’d be swapping their half-baked roster today for another half-baked roster in three or five years.
To incorporate time into our analysis would be to admit that an endless rebuild is not possible, but even worse, a long rebuild is not possible either. The only way to ensure maximal playoff appearances is to turn over player-assets on a tight and strict timeline — say, three years at the most. Three years so the draftee at t=0 is part of the team at t=3, and a core player at t=5 supported by the (good enough to stay) players that were there at t=0 and those picked up along the way.
Any longer time span would be too much of a gap between the player-asset at t=0 and those of t=[end of rebuild] and the forces of time would have had something to say about that.
The Habs, famously, drafted for immediate need and then rushed their draftee into the NHL — the strategy didn’t bear fruit.
When that bozo signed Semin, the one thing every analyst missed was the opportunity cost.
It wasn't just that Semin was garbage, but they spent money and roster position that they couldn't get back. That season was a disaster. Hit the gym Bergie.