Today it was announced that Jason Pominville signed a 5-year extension for the same cap hit as Blake Wheeler of the Winnipeg Jets. I didn’t think much of it at first until I heard the number for the cap hit 5.6 million per season.
There is some reason to really compare the players, they are right-wingers and now they are division rivals on two teams that have struggled to make the post season in recent years.
The other thing I thought was interesting was how the two forwards arrived at the same cap hit; via the term of the contract. Pominville has a 5-year deal and Wheeler has a 6 year deal, the former turns 31 in November while the latter just turned 27.
It seems to me that GMs are betting heavily on a significant cap increase in the coming seasons as why tie up 5.6 million in a guy who turns 36 at the beginning of his final year in the deal? For Pominville it’s basically status quo as he only has a $100,000 per year increase over his last deal, wouldn’t we all like that problem?
So the question that bugs me is why give Wheeler 6 years vs giving Pominville 5? Granted age has a lot more to do with contracts terms than we think so it’s probably worth exploring. There’s been enough work on the production points at various ages for NHL players by far smarter people than me so I won’t bore you with that analysis to prove a point. I will give you some data though.
At 5v5 play Pominville for the past three years is at 2.11 points per 60 minutes played while Wheeler is 2.06, just .05 difference. Wheeler played 350 more minutes in that same time frame. Wheeler had a 9.79 shooting percentage vs 10.53 for Pominville. I went through all sorts of fancy stats for each player looking for any distinct difference and there really is none other than Pominville is always just a bit higher than Wheeler.
So if a GM is considering all sorts of things in his decision to sign a player at a certain cost for a certain term he probably can see what I have seen, Pominville is a better player than Wheeler but not but a wide margin. It would explain the same cap hit for each and a slightly shorter term due to Pominville’s 4 years of age over Wheeler and it’s probably a fair assessment.
Where things get murky again, at least on paper, is how that value versus age plays out. I used the time line of 2000 to end of 2013.
Here is the list of players averaging .79 points per game (Pominville’s career average)at
ages 35 and 36
Here is the list of players averaging .62 points per game at
ages 32 and 33
While neither player are being paid like superstars (if you believe that 5.6 million is no longer than kind of benchmark) they are being paid to perform. In this case the list of players aged 35 and 36 seems who could output to Pominville’s career average seems like a much more ‘exclusive’ group, at least to me. Is Pominville a player that you would associate with those names on that list? There’s a chance he could be but he may not be.
Of the 30 players on that list I counted 14 who had seasons matching Pominville’s average within the three years of the 2004-05 lockout ending. Only one season after 07-08 did the scoring leader exceed that 07-08 total. I think the 14 players who hit that .79 number or above all benefitted a bit from the NHL’s desire to emphasize skill and scoring after the lockout. Will Pominville or Wheeler have that benefit of another effort to increase skill and scoring?
The purpose of this was not to say one player was better than the other, rather it was to understand where the value lies in near identical deals based on players with different age points at signing. If you are a believer in Pominville then you think you are getting good value for him and that he has a chance to keep pace to his career output. In the case of Wheeler it’s a bit different. The Jets had to buy a bit of his UFA years up front. They probably got the best ones and paid a bit of premium for a guy who has only a career .62 pts per game average.
Look at the names on that list comparing Wheeler’s age and his career points average and it’s a heck of a lot longer than the one for Pominville. The Jets are probably making the same leap of faith bet as the Wild did in that Wheeler will stick close to his career average output. The difference is that with Wheeler his average is, quite average.
The Wild may have paid a bit more for Pominville due age and to keep him from the market and the Jets sort of did the same thing except buying up his UFA time. I go back to the statement about GMs betting the cap goes up because when I look at these deals it certainly seems the price to be average has really climbed.
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