When I suggested the other day that the Coyotes should trade some futures for the present, many people said that it was too early, and that they should keep finishing poorly and drafting high.
I don't blame anyone for thinking this, because for years, that is how the NHL worked. You could patiently build your team if you had the wherewithal to do so.
The problem is that the salary cap and unrestricted free agency make that a bad idea in today's world.
If you put a player into the NHL immediately after you draft him, you could lose him for nothing seven years later when he's 25. If you plan on building for five years, that leaves you two years to try and win.
That's a worst case scenario, and players rarely leave the team that drafted them by that age, but it does start a ticking clock on any rebuild.
The second problem is that the NHL is set up so that young players are exploited so that veterans get paid. Auston Matthews - arguably a top five player in the entire league - is going to earn less than one-million dollars to play this season.
If the Leafs were so inclined, they could defer the bonus part of his cap-hit until the following season and have a top five player with 1/5rth the cap hit of your average second pairing defenseman.
This means that there is a definite incentive for teams to try to win whenever they've got very good players on entry level contracts.
So instead of building patiently, the Leafs went out and signed the most expensive UFA in the history of the league. Why? Because the math says they'll never have a better opportunity to win than when they can fit more players in under the cap than, strictly speaking, they should be able to.
Then there is a third thing: the ages of your players in their prime.
We know that players in their thirties get worse every season (on average) and that once a player is around 26 or 27 it is highly unlikely that they improve. There will be anomalies, but generally speaking this never happens.
So you've also got to weigh this in trying to figure out when to start loading up to compete in any given season.
Take the Coyotes, for example: They've got Dylan Strome, Clayton Keller, Christian Dvorak, Jacob Chychrun and three other players on ELC contracts. Except for one of them, all are under a 900K cap hit. Those players don't need to be very good to outperform their contracts, giving Arizona the luxury to spend elsewhere. (They sold their cap space, which is smart, but they could also have just bought more expensive other players).
Furthermore, the Coyotes have nine players on their roster aged 27-33. Those players are good now, but they are less good, on average, every year after this one. And, in the NHL, any team that makes the playoffs has a shot at winning the Championship.
So the Coyotes have to weigh the fact that a good portion of their current team is never going to be better than they are now, while another significant portion are on cheap deals.
The only way it would be inadvisable to go for it now was if doing so had a very high cost.
But it doesn't.
The beauty of the salary cap is that when a contract expires, that's almost as good as getting a new player. (e.g: a UFA walks to another team, but UFAs are almost always over paid, so you can almost certainly re-invest that money more efficiently if you're smart about it).
Furthermore, the NHL rewards tanking.
Also, young UFAs are available, and you can sell your cap space in years when you're rebuilding.
So a "rebuild" doesn't even have to take long. Especially if you realize when the window closes and you sell off your remaining good players with value. The bonus here is that if you're lucky, you'll sign a few really good players to long-term deals that will make going through the cycle that much easier.
In the NHL, with today's rules, you can rebuild quickly. Therefore, it makes sense to "go for it" whenever your team starts to turn the corner at all.
The optimum strategy, as far as I can tell, would be to go through a much faster cycle of going all-in and then tearing it down than we are used to.
So the idea of the slow "five year" rebuild is now a myth. Teams should be moving aggressively to go all-in much sooner than is currently done.
The Coyotes should do what it takes to load up for this year, and maybe next year, see what happens and then re-evaluate afterwards.
Washington Capitals Blogger • 
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