How to Build a Contender – Part 4: The Difficulty of Acquiring Elite Talent

Photo Credit: Bill Streicher/USA TODAY Sports

In the opening instalments of this series objectively looking at how teams can best build a contending team, we introduced the concept of Goals Above Replacement (GAR) before moving on to explore the impact of aging on player performance, and what sort of salary cap structure is maintained by successful teams. 

What we’ve found should come as no surprise. 

The teams with the highest goals against replacement won the most games, and were most frequently among those competing for the Stanley Cup into mid-May and June. When looking at the make up of these teams, it wasn’t just that they had a high overall team GAR, but they had two or more players with elite level GAR, typically at least one with a GAR over 15 and one with a GAR over 20. Again, this should come as no surprise. Its the stars and superstars that move the dial in the NHL. Depth matters in the playoffs, but this is how it’s always been.

How do teams go about procuring these types of rare talents? Let’s investigate in Part 4 of our ‘how to build a contender’ series.

The players in the over 20 GAR bucket are pretty much who you’d expect to be in the top 2.4% (207 out of 8480 player seasons looking at the 10 year period from 2005-06 to 2014-15). Looking closer at those 207 elite over 20 GAR seasons, we start to see a lot of the same names coming up. In fact 128 (62%) of those  41 players who had more than one over elite 20 GAR season. 

Understanding the importance of acquiring elite talent in the hopes of building a Stanley Cup contender, I thought I’d look a bit closer at those biggest elite difference makers. Who are they, and how did their teams acquire them? To break this down, I look at how elite talent was acquired by the team they played their elite season for, whether it be trade, draft, or free agency. Note, some of the players show up in more than once. 

The trades involving players on this list span almost two decades, from the Teemu Selanne trade in 1996 to the Tyler Seguin trade in 2013. On average, NHL teams make roughly 100 trades a year, so I’d expect there were roughly 1,700 trades from Selanne to Seguin. Of course, the War-on-ice team only has GAR data going back to 2005-06, so there’s undoubtedly some pre-GAR era elite players missing. That said, seeing 13 elite players acquired via trade over this period, there’s probably only a 1-2% shot you’re going to land an elite talent this way. It’s great when it happen, but hardly a strategy you can bank on. 

The odds of finding an elite talent outside of the 1st round is exceedingly slim. Case in point is the Detroit Red Wings, who were fortunate enough to have lightning strike twice with their selections of Pavel Datsyuk and Henrik Zetterberg  in the 6th round of 1998 and 7th round of 1999, respectively. Since then, they’ve only selected one player from the 6th round or later who has played over 200 NHL games – Jonathan Ericsson. 

These are the players that drive fans crazy, and make general managers look bad (how did we pick Michael Grabner over Claude Giroux?!?). 

We should probably chill on judging executives harshly for failing to strike oil late in the first-round though. As we can see over the course of the six drafts we’re looking at (fro 2002 to 2007), only 10 players out of 150 selections from 6-30 (6.7%) turned into elite talents. 

Stockpiling first round picks doesn’t guarantee you landing a Corey Perry or Ryan Getzlaf, far from it, but the odds are at least clearly higher that you might land a player of this calibre than the methods we’ve described previously. 

When fans talk about wanting their team to tank, it is with the hopes of landing a player of the calibre of those listed above. The draft period these players were selected from spans from 1997 to 2009, so seeing 13 names out of those 65 players selected (20%) really speaks to how much higher your odds are in acquiring game changing talent when picking with a top 5 pick. 

As we saw in the earlier parts of this series, in order to have a legitimate shot at winning the Stanley Cup, you really need to have a team capable of accumulating a higher (i.e. over 100) goals against replacement, and that the teams that successfully surpass this threshold do so because of they have a one or more elite players on their roster. 

As we can see, many teams beat extremely long odds to find these diamonds-in-the-rough through either late round picks, or via trades and free agency, however these are really lottery ticket scenarios that you really can’t build a strategy around. 

On the other hand, we see from the players selected in the top 5, and less so later in the first round, that the odds increase significantly if you’re able to acquire high-end first-round draft picks. 

While, lottery picks by no means guarantee you’ll find yourself with an elite NHLer, we can see why this strategy was attractive to a team like Buffalo when there were two potentially generational players available in the 2015 draft. On the other end of the equation, looking at the success rates of first rounders in general, we can see why it was so important to the Canucks to acquire multiple first round selections as they did in 2013 and 2014, and it will be very interesting to see if they can do it again in 2016 given they have a number of players on existing contracts that could reasonably command somewhat significant returns at the trade deadline.