Balancing Present & Future Wins

Evaluating an NHL organization isn't merely about glancing at their record

I noted at the onset of the 2022-23 season that the Calgary Flames organization is haunted by the specter of mediocrity. Predictably, the current team is lurching towards yet another 9th-place finish and 16th overall pick, so frustration and apathy have begun settling over the fanbase.

The Flames falling back into the NHL’s middle class isn’t, in itself, the tragedy. It is that so much of the organization’s future has been spent to achieve this disappointing anti-climax. Calgary has already traded away six of their picks over the next three drafts, and only one team in the league has more cap budget committed to their 2023-24 roster. They also have the seventh-oldest roster in the league.

This is a foundation built of sand, an ornate and precarious castle soon to be eroded by the coming tide.

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Over the years, my own writing and interests have drifted from the day-to-day, push-and-pull accounting of roster moves and game reviews to the theories and philosophies that underpin team building. As a fan of this club, so committed to its perpetual wheel spinning, I’ve come to realize that practically any decision made by coaches or management can be rationalized in isolation.

But each step on the path to nowhere need not be obviously errant. Unfortunately, if your gaze is always fixed on the proceeding 20 steps, it’s easy to get lost. You need a larger vision, a distant destination with a clear point on the horizon to properly orient yourself.

This is the meta gripe I have with the Flames. They don't seem to get better at running their organization. There are peaks and valleys in performance owing to the variance inherent in sports, but there's no meaningful incremental learning happening day-to-day, season-to-season, year-to-year. No course corrections with the aim of getting somewhere specific, instead it is a zig zag pattern that ultimately spins the org in circles.

The salary cap has been in place for a couple of decades now, but the team still has little idea how to operate efficiently under this paradigm, what levers to pull to improve over time, and how to structure bets and opportunity costs given the landscape and their place in it.

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As Treliving was fashioning his risky gambit in the offseason, I realized that evaluating the club by the roster assembled on paper or even by its nominal record this season was, at best, incomplete. I started to think about both present wins and future wins, and how organizations should be drawing up their long-term roadmaps based explicitly on this equilibrium.

Given the tools and models available these days, I believe it is possible to look at an org's total asset base, depth chart, and cap budget to holistically assess how well or poorly a GM is managing the team.

This is important because the NHL is essentially an efficiency contest. And not just in terms of what you're doing with your cap on the active roster, but how you are marshaling things like your prospect file and your draft assets.

For example - at a player level, paying more than the minimum cap hit for a replacement-level player is inefficient. Paying more than the minimum for a sub-replacement level player is even more inefficient. But paying, say, $6.75M for prime Johnny Gaudreau, is a huge surplus in value. It is possible to model this up-and-down the active roster, and then include things like unspent cap budget or dead cap space from buyouts in the calculation. Let’s call this stuff “present wins value”.

From there, you could also model future wins based on the projected value of prospects and draft picks. This includes the expected value of a 1st round draft pick vs a 4th rounder, or the expected value of Jakob Pelletier (probable NHLer) vs Cole Huckins (longshot). One could, theoretically, calculate the future projected value of a draft pick or prospect and then rationalize that with the marginal value calculation of the active roster/cap budget. This, in theory, gives you a “total” picture of where the club is in terms of winning now against potentially winning later as well.

That’s a mouthful. Let’s distill it down a bit - the job of an NHL GM is to fundamentally understand and manage the balance between present wins (active roster players, present year cap/cash allocations) versus future wins (draft picks, prospects, future cap/cash allocations).

In a quest to succeed, NHL GMs often try to pull future wins into the present. For instance, signing a star UFA forward to an 8-year contract that extends into his late 30s is spending future wins (when that contract will likely be grossly inefficient) in order to accrue present wins. Similarly, moving first-round picks or bluechip prospects for established stars is similar, all the way down to practically every move an org makes.

While a lot of ink is spilled assessing the quality of these bets to one degree or another, not enough attention is spent on this macro-equilibrium in general.

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This concept is clarifying. The worst-run orgs have a value deficit in both the present and the future levels. Meaning they are spending a lot in present wins assets, and not winning, while also spending a lot of their future wins, leading to them not winning later as well. This is the conundrum Calgary faces.

Obviously modeling out present and future wins across the various asset classes in no guarantee of anything. The map is not the terrain, as it were. But it would help establish where a team in is in the totality of its asset base, whether it is operating with a deep deficit or large surplus, and become a tool for internal intellectual honesty.

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My focus over the next little while will be to continue to expand on this concept as well as investigate other fundamental team-building strategies and tactics. I

If this line of thinking is of interest, I’d recommend reading The Rebuilding Blog and Hockey Curious. If you’re a Flames fan and not allergic to deeply critical discussions of the team, feel free to join the BBP Discord (where much of this article was born).