As their rebuild kicks on towards the adding and re-signing players segment, the Philadelphia Flyers still have work to do when it comes to getting value back from the contracts they hand out.
The Flyers have signed a slew of players to contract extensions in recent years and months: Trevor Zegras, Jamie Drysdale, Dan Vladar, Travis Konecny, Owen Tippett, and Tyson Foerster all stand out.
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In addition to their overall lack of star power, the problem with the Flyers is simply that too many contracts are more or less in line with what the player earned based on the market, rather than getting a team-friendly deal more often than once in a while.
Dom Luszczyszyn of The Athletic just released his annual assessment of every NHL team’s contract efficiency, which is based on the on-ice value the team gets back relative to all their players’ contracts.
The Flyers, after ranking a paltry 26th in the contract efficiency totem pole last year, placed 20th this year. That’s a modest improvement, but still firmly in the bottom half of the NHL.
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Here’s what Luszczyszyn had to say about the Orange and Black at this point in time:
“One year makes a pretty big difference. The Flyers’ roster responded really well to Rick Tocchet hockey, with much of the roster’s value taking a positive step forward. Noah Cates was arguably the biggest beneficiary of that, and the Tyson Foerster extension helped add a fair bit of surplus value.
“Still, the Flyers land a bit below average thanks to a string of deals that are close to fair for both sides from Trevor Zegras, Christian Dvorak, Jamie Drysdale and Dan Vladar. There’s nothing wrong with that, but in a rising cap world in which other teams are getting massive wins, fair deals aren’t quite enough.”
Luszczyszyn notes that Noah Cates and Tyson Foerster have two of the better deals on the roster, and the caveat there is that these are two defense-first, middle-six players.
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Cates, 27, has three years remaining on his contract at a modest $4 million cap hit per year, which is looking more and more like a steal in today’s cap environment, especially compared to teammate Christian Dvorak’s less tame five-year deal that comes with a $5.15 AAV.
Luszczyszyn has Cates’s contract at an A-, while Dvorak checks in a few pegs below at a B-.
Among the Flyers’ biggest detractors for Luszczyszyn’s model are free agent signing Noel Acciari (C+, two years, $2.8 million AAV), Travis Konecny (C, seven years, $8.75 million AAV), and Sean Couturier (D, four years, $7.75 million).
The Flyers went out of their way to secure the aging Acciari in free agency, and they gave Konecny a long-term eight-year deal that would still carry a large cap hit well past his prime years, which they aren’t really paying for in the deal.
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As for other recent deals, like Luszczyszyn noted, Zegras, Drysdale, and Vladar all got fair value: B-, B-, and B-.
No Flyers players were graded out better than an A, though Cates, Foerster, and Travis Sanheim each got an A-. And this same Flyers front office nearly traded Sanheim before that deal even began.
That all said, it would be nice if the Flyers could do better than to get surplus value on players other than depth pieces; Zegras especially sticks out.
Time will tell what happens with Porter Martone and Matvei Michkov once their entry-level contracts expire.
While the Flyers have improved from last year, they can only go up so far with the raw amount of players they already have signed to long-term deals, and especially the ones who are in or near their 30s.
