It’s Friday, just a week before the NHL trade deadline (March 7 at 3 p.m. ET), so what better time for a little thought experiment:
At a moment when teams are scrambling to wheel and deal for reinforcements, what if they never made any trades at all?
Back in 2016, I explored this idea in MLB using a tool from the late, great Baseball Gauge, which (among many other useful features) had a way to track how many Wins Above Replacement were generated by players who originally debuted with each franchise — regardless of where they played later. It was a fun way to see which teams upgraded the most from their homegrown talent, and which ones might have been better off sticking with their own players all along.
So what if we applied the same logic to hockey?
What if every NHL team was only allowed to use players who debuted for them? Who would be better or worse off than they are in reality? And what does that tell us about how well each team manages their talent pipelines?
Let’s start with a comparison between the amount of Goals Above Replacement (GAR) per 82 games each team has actually gotten from its current roster and the GAR/82 they would have gotten from their own original players1 this season:
On the positive side, the Washington Capitals have done far better with the group they actually have — which includes external acquisitions G Logan Thompson, D Jakob Chychrun and C Dylan Strome, to go with homegrown stars like Alex Ovechkin, Aliaksei Protas, Tom Wilson, John Carlson and Connor McMichael. If the Caps had ridden their original cast, they would still have Dmitry Orlov, but would also be relying on the diminished returns from Chandler Stephenson, Jakub Vrána, André Burakovsky and a number of struggling goalies (most notably Philipp Grubauer).
[Related: When Will Alex Ovechkin Break Wayne Gretzky’s NHL Goals Record?]
While not quite as shrewd in this regard as Washington, the Winnipeg Jets, Dallas Stars, Tampa Bay Lightning, Florida Panthers, New Jersey Devils and Colorado Avalanche stand out as teams who were smart to retool their rosters on the fly. All have homegrown stars — guys like Connor Hellebuyck, Jason Robertson, Andrei Vasilevskiy, Nikita Kucherov, Sasha Barkov, Jack Hughes, Cale Makar and Nathan MacKinnon are among the biggest names in the sport, in fact — but none of these clubs would be as good as they are (Stanley Cup contenders all) without extra moves they made to complement their core talent.
The opposite side of this coin involves teams such as the Chicago Blackhawks, Anaheim Ducks, Ottawa Senators, Utah Hockey Club (née Coyotes) and Buffalo Sabres, all of whom would be far better off without making any moves after initially acquiring a player. They may have had their reasons, but each shipped away players who could have actually made them competitive this season — names like Filip Gustavsson, Joey Daccord and Mark Stone (Ottawa), Brandon Hagel (Chicago), Jack Eichel and Sam Reinhart (Buffalo), Shea Theodore (Anaheim), and Chychrun and Strome (Utah, who apparently sent a pipeline of players to Washington).
Do you think maybe the Senators and Sabres, both searching for an end to historically long playoff droughts, would like to still have some of those guys in their lineup?
Finally, we have to point out a couple of teams that are just plain outliers: the Vegas Golden Knights and Seattle Kraken, who both joined the league within the past decade. They’ve had fewer years to develop homegrown stars due to expansion; each roster is still dotted with players who are around from the very beginning of the franchise, guys who (by definition) debuted with other teams as well.
Meanwhile, here’s another way to think about our hypothetical world without trades and signings — a set of reimagined league standings, ranked by team points per game if they had all of their original players:
Interestingly, the Jets would still lead the standings (albeit by a smaller margin) if they rolled with their homegrown talent. But the next handful of teams in the entire league would be the Senators, Ducks, Wild and Utah H.C., hypothetically speaking. Let’s just say that the top of the real standings looks… different. At the same time, Florida would rank 18th, New Jersey 19th, Colorado 24th and Washington 26th in the new-look standings if everyone forced to only use their original debuts.
So, what are some of the big takeaways we can glean from this fun little exercise?
For one thing, a team’s ability to retain and acquire talent matters as much or more than its ability to draft and develop players. The quality of a team’s original players has a correlation of 0.48 with its real-life standings points per game, meaning success is about a lot more than just having first dibs on the right players. Also, the effects of making the wrong moves — letting good players walk and/or bringing in worse ones — can be huge: just think about the difference between our world and one in which the Sens and Ducks are the second- and third-best teams in the NHL.
And lastly, it’s a reminder that sometimes the best move is not making one at all. Last season, I found that talent added at the trade deadline carries a surprisingly small correlation with a team’s performance over the rest of the regular season. With all of the hype and excitement, we can get enamored with the idea of the season-altering blockbuster. But plenty of teams in the charts above would be doing a lot better if they were simply banned from ever making trades, and forced to stick with the rosters they came in with.
Filed under: NHL, Hockey, Frivolities
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Defined as players who originally debuted in the NHL with the franchise in question.
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