Sorry for the length of this post.
Hopefully most will find it worth the read...
I mentioned yesterday that several weeks ago I analyzed the Roster and Cap hits of 10 Teams, in an effort to get a decent sample size of the league and be able to create breakdown of Cap hits by position.
Since there were 1/3 of the teams, some players Caps were obviously not included...hence why you may think of a player and challenge the figures for a certain position.
The 10 teams I selected were as follows:
Boston, Tampa, Washington, Pittsburgh, St Louis, NY Isles, Winnipeg, Nashville, Chicago, San Jose.
I selected teams that were successful and had relatively mature rosters with some higher-priced talent. Only 10 because it is friggin' time-consuming.
1st, I wanted to use the Sabres Cap situation as the baseline for the following to compute how much is available in Cap for their Contracts, but accounted for other commitments such as Buyouts, Bonuses, and hold-over to enable flexibility, so I used:
-Cap ceiling $81,500,000
-Buyouts (Hodgson) $900,000
-2019-2010 Bonus rollover $3,000,000
-2020-2021 Bonuses $3,000,000
That left $74,600,000 available to spend and bank a holdover...so maybe $73,000,000 for AVV only, would still be tight.
Here's what the analysis of those 10 teams showed:
Forwards:
.............LW.......................C......................RW
Line 1.. 6.9% ($5.7m)... 8.0% ($6.5m)... 6.5% ($5.3m)
Line 2. 4.3% ($3.5m)... 7.5% ($6.1m)... 6.0% ($4.9m)
Line 3. 3.0% ($2.5m)... 3.5% ($2.9m)... 2.7% ($2.2m)
Line 4. 2.1% ($1.7m)... 2.0% ($1,6m)... 2.5% ($2.0m)
13th F... 1.1% ($0.9m)
Defense/Goalie:
.........................LhD......................RhD.......................G
1st Pair. 5.8% ($4.7m).... 5.7% ($4.8m).... 6.2% ($5.1m)
2nd Pair. 4.3% ($3.5m).... 4.9% ($4.0m).... 2.1% ($1.7m)
3rd Pair. 2.2% ($1.8m).... 2.0% ($2.4m)....
7th D. 1.2% ($0.95m).
The above percentages total 91.1% which gets me to $74.2m...about $1.2M over the target of $73.0m identified above...pretty close...but some "savings" would be necessary to get that Hold-back up to just $1.6m (which isn't a lot of flexibility).
But it could serve as a rough "blueprint"
If you use this as a guide going forward, and plug in existing Sabres contract commitments like
-Jack @ $10M
-Skinner @ $9M
-Okposo @ $6M
that is already $10M over the blueprint.
Hence why I continually look for opportunities for cheaper players at certain positions like Larsson, Girgs, Mojo, Risto, Montour, Miller, Rhino...
Yup, $500k or $1.0M per player matters |