Why do UFA contracts for big-name defensemen age poorly so fast?

Credit: Seth Jones (© Jamie Sabau-USA TODAY Sports)

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Seth Jones. Colton Parayko. Darnell Nurse. Oliver Ekman-Larsson. Until recently, Drew Doughty and Erik Karlsson. Even Morgan Rielly is starting to join the conversation already.

What do all of these defensemen have in common? All of them are some of the biggest names in the league, and all of them are currently on contracts that are already being talked about as below the value they provide. Some of their deals are even considered among the worst in the league.

Now, it was universally agreed upon by the court of public opinion when almost all these deals were signed that they would not age well in the later years, but recently this is happening much quicker. Jones, Parayko, Nurse, and Rielly are all just in their first years of their extensions, and already many people in the hockey world are dreading the remainder of those deals.

So, why is this happening? Let’s break it down and take a look at some reasons that these deals are aging poorly quicker than expected. Not every contract will apply to all these reasons, but a lot of these will apply to at least a couple.

The Flat Cap

Let’s get the easy one out of the way first, especially since it’s not really the fault of the players or the teams that signed those deals: the flat salary cap.

When Doughty and Karlsson signed their eight-year extensions with cap hits north of $11 million in the summers of 2018 and 2019, respectively, they kicked off what was looking like the start of a new era in defenseman contracts. As arguably the two top defensemen in the league, they made bank on their first UFA contracts, and the market was starting to trend in the direction of a lot of high-end defensemen starting to get paid in eight figures, much like how Jonathan Toews and Patrick Kane started that trend for forwards when they signed their deals in 2014 and Carey Price did for goalies in 2017.

But then, this weird thing happened. A global pandemic began, causing the league to go into a shutdown, and then when it finally reopened, it took more than a year to start bringing fans back into the arenas and allowing teams to profit.

This led to a salary cap that stayed put for a few seasons, and while it didn’t halt the market the way many thought it would, it did slow it down a bit. Alex Pietrangelo was the first defenseman of Doughty and Karlsson’s caliber to hit the UFA market, even changing teams, all he could muster out of free agency was $8.8 million, showing that those big names wouldn’t be getting quite as much money as they wanted, especially if they wanted to play for competitive teams.

Doughty and Karlsson are still the only defensemen in the salary cap era to have AAVs higher than $10 million, and with the flat cap stalling the market, it’s making their contracts look a bit worse in comparison. Since the pandemic began, Pietrangelo’s $8.8 million AAV is the highest given to a player 29 years or older, which was the age Doughty and Karlsson signed their deals at, while the highest in general is Zach Werenski’s $9,583,333.

The market seems set right now for that $8-9 million range being the go-to for an elite defenseman, so unless Rasmus Dahlin changes that next season, Doughty and Karlsson will look like huge outliers for most of, if not all of their contracts.

The Aging Curve

Age is the other obvious factor involved, as no player is ever going to be at their peak for the entirety of their career, even over the course of a long-term, six-to-eight-year contract. I don’t think anyone will dispute that age plays a big role in contracts aging poorly; age is literally in that phrase.

However, the reason why I present the aging curve is not for the concept itself, but because a good portion of the hockey world still doesn’t quite know when the peak of that curve is.

A player’s prime years are always talked about as falling between the ages of 26 and 30, as that’s when they peak physically but also gain enough knowledge and experience to excel at the game mentally. While the latter reason may extend a player’s prime years by a few more, for the former reason that isn’t exactly the case.

As far as physical performance goes, a lot of players will usually find their best seasons happen between the ages of 22 and 26, sometimes even earlier than that. A big reason why this wasn’t known for a while is because only recently have younger players really started to not only make the NHL sooner, but also play a bigger role on teams much quicker.

If players aren’t making the league until the age of 22-23, then their prime years won’t be until 26 because they’ll need a few seasons to not only gain some experience, but also gain the trust of management and their coaches to get a bigger role and display their true talent. But if a player is entering the league a season or two after being drafted, then they make that process a few years quicker and suddenly they have that experience and trust at the same time of their peak physical form.

I’m nowhere near smart enough to whip together an aging model curve myself, but there are some good studies out there from significantly smarter people to help prove my point from a more analytical perspective. Dom Luszczyszyn consistently cites a player’s peak years as 22-26 when referencing his model in his work; Evolving Wild were mentioning a player’s peak was between 22-25 in 2017; and now-Carolina Hurricanes assistant general manager Eric Tulsky was referencing a player’s scoring peak was around the age of 25 in 2014 before the youth takeover in the league even began.

So this affects contracts for players, or in our case defensemen, because if a good chunk of the league believes a player’s prime to be 26-30, and it’s actually 22-26, there’s going to be a huge difference in what player will be paid and what they should be paid at various points of their career.

If you’re a general manager signing a 27-year-old defenseman to a long-term contract, you’re going to be content with a high salary because you think you’re paying for several more years of his prime, and you’ll only need to be concerned about the final few seasons of that deal. The reality is, you aren’t paying for that prime at all – you’re paying for what they were, maybe getting a few seasons of a similar level before the deal starts to age poorly.

The Restricted/Unrestricted Free Agency structure

Going off the aging curve, the current structure of restricted and unrestricted free agency doesn’t help the matter of contracts aging poorly.

Based on the current rules, a player can become an unrestricted free agent in two ways. Either he is not given a qualifying offer from the team with his rights, or more commonly, he has to either have played seven seasons or reach the age of 27 to no longer have rights with the team and have full control over where he plays.

What this means when you consider the aging curve is that when a player is in their prime years, their rights are fully controlled by the team they play for. Not only does that mean they are stuck with a certain team for that long aside from requesting a trade, but getting a contract where they’re paid at market value is significantly trickier.

Out of an entry-level contract, a player has basically no rights, as they can’t go to arbitration with a team, so outside of sitting out until they get what they want or another team signing them to an offer sheet (which rarely happens due to the compensation prices and how boring general managers are), the team could shortchange them with very little consequences.

And then even when they get to arbitration, they still likely won’t get what they think they deserve, as the arbitrator will probably land between the price they want and the price their team wants.

So of course when they finally hit unrestricted free agency, they’re going to cash in as much as they can. If the demand is there, not only will they get paid as much as they think they’re worth, they’ll probably get paid more because teams will be bidding for their services and going well over that price.

However, this almost always occurs after a player’s prime, meaning that these teams are bidding for their services with their best years behind them, meaning that most players will get their biggest payday after their prime, making it much easier for that contract to age worse.

Injuries

You know what really helps speed up the aging decline process? Injuries.

A nasty injury to your arm or wrist, and suddenly your shot or passing ability could be set back permanently. Tweak something in your groin or leg badly enough, and your footspeed, edgework, and agility could be in jeopardy. Heck, we’ve even had Jake Muzzin say that he played hesitantly after a concussion due to the anxiety associated with coming back from it initially.

Now that the game is played at a much quicker pace, not only do those injuries affect your play more because slowing down by even a fraction of your usual pace puts you well behind the rest of the league, but it also increases the chances of getting hurt.

With the league this fast right now, you have to move quickly, make decisions quickly, and react to other people’s decisions quickly. Make the wrong move initially, and suddenly that next reaction has to be made even quicker just to prevent a big scoring chance, so all those quick movements and reactions are going to result in awkward movements from time to time that can tweak something in your body.

Also, players moving faster hasn’t stopped the game from being physical, so suddenly hits are that much more dangerous because two players are colliding at a much more accelerated pace and causing a bigger impact when that pace is slammed to a halt. Sure, the hits aren’t as dirty as when Scott Stevens was lining up people’s heads in open ice, but the speed has kept the damage relatively similar, as seen with Jacob Trouba pulling off clean hits that appear dirty just from the impact.

So as a player ends up with more injuries throughout their career, they will slow down, making that age decline significantly sharper, and suddenly that contract looks much worse early on.

Look at Erik Karlsson for example. The first three seasons of his current contract seemed like an albatross because consistent injuries to his lower-body caused him to lose a step and be much more susceptible to mistakes, and it took away one of his biggest strengths in his skating ability. In order to return to his elite level like he did this season, it took an increased role, more defensive responsibility from his forwards, and time for his injuries to heal.

Another one is Victor Hedman in 2021. He had a stretch for almost half the season where he was at-best replacement level due to an injury that he had to play through, and really only saw his play improve once he had some time off during the offseason.

And sure, this can apply to any position, but there is a difference. If a forward slows down, you can just transition them to the wing where they have less responsibility and can just focus on what they need to. If you’re a defenseman, you’re stuck where you are. Not only that, but there is a lot more physicality involved and much more unique movements, like skating backward and transitioning from forward to backward, that require a lot more agility and flexibility with your movement. Aging and injuries can make that more difficult, or at least enough to slow down your play at the NHL level.

Teams struggle to evaluate defensemen properly

The final reason we’ll touch on may have the biggest overall impact on why they age so quickly, and that’s because teams struggle to properly evaluate defensemen, so the contract “ages poorly” because it was never a good one to begin with.

Now, you can’t entirely fault teams, because defensemen are tricky to evaluate. A forward is easy to figure out because more often than not, they get paid based on their points, unless their defensive impact is so big that it adds to it. A goalie is easy to figure out because if they can consistently stop the puck year after year, they’ll get paid. Both positions are paid based on the results of easily tracked events in hockey.

But a defenseman is much trickier because the concept of defense implies the lack of an event at all. You see highlight reels of amazing goals and great saves, but you don’t see highlight reels of a defenseman in perfect position or preventing the other team from entering the zone.

So that results in defensemen’s value being left up to the eye test if you aren’t into more analytical approaches, and that just creates chaos. While there is value in the eye test, there is also a lot of variation, because your opinion now relies on what your biases are, how much you watch of a player, and how good your memory is.

Which is why defensemen usually end up getting paid based on two things: production and ice time. While defensemen don’t have to be offensive, it’s still a valuable thing to have in a lineup, and a rarity, so that will get you paid. As for ice time, a lot of that comes down to the belief that “if our/their coach played them a lot, then clearly they can play big minutes and be paid as such”.

Of the 55 defensemen making $5 million or more this season, only seven of them average under 20 minutes a night in 2022-23. Of those seven, all of them were averaging more than 20 minutes a night during the season prior to signing their current contracts.

While using points and time on ice does make sense in theory, it can lead to a lot of mistakes. Look no further than Seth Jones, who has quite consistently been referenced as one of the most overrated defensemen in the league in the analytics community. While he’s not hot garbage, he’s spent a majority of his career playing top minutes and regarded as a top defender in the mainstream when his underlying numbers have consistently been at best mediocre and at worst below replacement level.

And yet in 2021, he got traded for two first-round picks, a second-round pick, and a top prospect before he signed an eight-year extension with a $9.5 million cap hit. Why? Because since 2015, he hasn’t averaged lower than 22 minutes of ice time, and since 2016 has scored at a pace of at least 0.5 points per game.

So of course a contract is going to look bad when a team ignores all the warning signs and goes off flawed metrics to evaluate defenseman to decide how much they’ll pay them. They’re basically setting themselves up for failure right off the bat.

Of course, these aren’t the only reasons. Like with other positions, sometimes a defenseman’s deal is signed after a career year that was clearly an outlier like Nurse’s in 2021. Sometimes a player is put in advantageous situations to boost their value, only for another team to be “sold the closer,” like what the Toronto Maple Leafs did to themselves with Nikita Zaitsev in 2017.

There are many reasons why defensemen contracts are aging poorly, but it mostly comes down to the fact that the game has changed, the market hasn’t adjusted to it yet, and the speed of the game is making the lack of adjustments look even worse as players are more vulnerable to slowing down quicker. And with some of the deals mentioned off the top coming in the last two years, it doesn’t look like those adjustments are coming just yet, at least on a league-wide scale.

But it’s safe to say that at this point, team’s are probably safer not committing big term and money to defensemen once they exit those prime years of 22-26, no matter how big their names are.