The Myth of the $10M Player

After eliminating the Maple Leafs, there was lots of talk about Carey Price being the first $10M player to ever win a round in the Stanley Cup playoffs, but why is that the focus?

Sporting a .935 save percentage, Carey Price has backstopped the Montreal Canadiens to their first conference final appearance since 2014, which Chris Kreider promptly ended Price’s season with an ‘accidental’ net crash that was the start of a cascade of knee injuries that cause Price to miss a ton of games over the next few seasons.

While there’s been plenty of ink spilled on how improbable and impressive this run by the Montreal Canadiens has been, along with some possibly justified trashing of the quality of the North Division, one continually mentioned anecdote bugs me.

Carey Price is the first player in the salary cap era who has a cap hit over $10M whose team has won a playoff series, and now he’s won two. That may be factually correct, but it’s incredibly misleading.

Humans naturally gravitate towards certain numbers. Most of us adjust the volume on our televisions by even numbers or by fives, the entire metric system is built around how easy it is to work with factors of 10. Knowing that, it’s not surprising that $10M is sticking point for many people, our brains love 10s, and it’s also where salaries go from seven figures to eight figures, which seems like a huge deal.

The issue with this fascination with $10M though, especially when we’re looking at the entire salary cap era, is that it completely ignores the actual salary cap. It may be less intuitive than simply looking at the annual average value (AAV), but when you’re looking at how much a player makes, it has to be relative to the salary cap both when the player signed the contract, and the year they won a playoff round.

So if we look at Carey Price’s contract overall, when his contract started it was worth 13.2 per cent of the Canadiens’ salary cap, and this season it’s worth 12.9 per cent. That’s still a very large chunk, but if we look at the history of the salary cap, how unlikely is it for a team to win a playoff round with a player making that large of a percentage of the cap?

To keep things fair, let’s only look at players whose contracts were signed after the 2004-05 NHL lockout.

If $10M is the marker, then that’s 12.227 per cent of the salary cap. If we set that as our jumping off point, using Cap Friendly to do a quick and dirty bit of research, these are the results we get of players who have earned more than 12.227 per cent of their team’s cap hits who have won at least a series in a given year.

In total, by my calculations, players who made an equivalent or better annual average contract value have won at least one round in the NHL’s Stanley Cup Playoffs 53 times in the salary cap era. To put it another way, it happened on average 3.3 times per year, that someone making that much money would advance out of the first round, and often there were two players on the same team doing it.

Carey Price doesn’t even stand out in terms of salary cap allotment here, I marked him in red as opposed to everyone else in blue. Price is neither the first goaltender (Roberto Luongo in 2007, Henrik Lundqvist in 2014 and 2015), the most expensive goaltender (Roberto Luongo in 2007 15.3 per cent of the cap, and Henrik Lundqvist at 13.2 per cent of the cap in 2014) to manage this feat. In fact, Price isn’t even the first Montreal Canadien to do it, that was P.K. Subban back in 2015, making 13.04 per cent of the cap.

Alex Ovechkin is clearly visible as the series of markers in a straight line on the far right, but even Ovechkin wasn’t the most expensive player on a relative scale, that was Scott Niedermayer in 2006 after signing in Anaheim as an unrestricted free agent, making 17.3 per cent of the salary cap. For scale, Connor McDavid made just 15.7 per cent of the Oilers’ salary cap when he first signed his deal. Niedermayer’s contract would be worth about $14.1M per season today.

So why is it that people are fixated on high cap numbers not correlating with playoff series wins, when over time it doesn’t appear that rare at all? For starters, before Price and the Canadiens did it this season, it hadn’t happened since Ovechkin and the Washington Capitals won the Stanley Cup in 2018, so there is a gap, but the biggest reason might be harder to see.

Because of the short era in the NHL of extremely long-term, back-diving contracts in order to skirt the salary cap, the salaries of the NHL’s superstars have been depressed slightly over nearly the last decade. The salary cap has risen, but the amount of space taken up by a team’s top player has dropped significantly.

Teams are also far more cautious about throwing around big money to unrestricted free agents now that more and more data shows the peril of not paying attention to aging curves, but the idea that paying big money for star players can’t net you a win in the playoffs is just wrong.

A small blip of two years without it happening has more to do with the fact that there are simply fewer players making over 12.227 per cent of the cap than there used to be than it being impossible to build around high salaried players. And also the Toronto Maple Leafs are cursed, which is very funny.