St. Louis Blues Salary Cap: The Most For The Money
By Kate Cimini
As we come down to the trade deadline, it’s good to take stock and examine where the St. Louis Blues salary cap is being spent. Is their money being frittered away on relatively useless players? Are there one or two contracts they’re holding on to that make no sense? Here, we examine which players are more cost-effective, or, who produces the most points per dollar spent on them. Today we will focus on the forwards; tomorrow, the defense.
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When we look at forwards, we tend to think offense. And when we think offense, we look at point production. Who scored the most goals? Who got the most assists? Points aren’t the only measure of good offense, but they are the easiest to quantify and the most concrete stat we can look at, offensively.
In the end, it comes down to money: how much St. Louis has, and how much St. Louis is willing to shill out for offensive production.
The Math And The Conclusions
To that end, we took each of the St. Louis Blues forwards and broke them down by point and dollar amount to see who was the best bargain for the Blues. To no one’s surprise, Tarasenko came out on top, at a mere $30,000 per point. His cap hit is insanely low ($1.8 million dollars for the year) and his points production has been insanely high this season. He is the highest-scoring player on the Blues at 60 points for the season, and is nearly equal in goals and assists at 31 of the former and 29 of the latter. Tarasenko is a gift to St. Louis this year, and we will look back on his cap hit for the year fondly.
All data taken from Spotrac.com and NHL.com
Schwartz, Lehtera, Jaskin and Lindstrom all come in at under $100,000 per point, some more dramatically than others. And all these players have very short-term contracts with St. Louis, and could be looking elsewhere, knowing that St. Louis is a cap team, or in layman’s terms, a team that runs very close to the cap ceiling.
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Schwartz, for example has a year left on his contract with the Blues, but come 2016 and Schwartz will be looking at signing for significantly more money. Lindstrom’s contract is up at the end of the year, and next season will close out Lehtera’s contract as well as Jaskin’s.
All these forwards are skill players who will net points wherever they go. So why not keep them with us?
Looking at the rest of the data, however, some of the other basement bargains might surprise you.
David Backes
While some might look at the above table and immediately single out Berglund in points production, what with having the highest cost-per-point rate of all ranked forwards, I am more interested in David Backes. Berglund has proven time and again that he is not a points-producer, but rather a points-stopper. He keeps pucks in the offensive zone, giving his wings time and opportunity to score. In essence, he’s an excellent 3C, though I would still argue that his cap hit is a little high.
Backes’ cap hit, on the other hand, is right about where it should be. But his points production is not. David Backes came in at approximately $110,000 per point as a 1C. Backes doesn’t have an unusually high cap hit, but he is a lot more physical than your average first-line center, which often means he is sitting in the box instead of netting a goal or an assist.
In fact, taking Backes’ other stats into consideration, such as his PIM, which is second-highest on the team at 86 minutes for the season (for comparison, most St. Louis forwards have PIM numbers in the aughts and teens). If he were to spend less time in the box, and more time on the ice, it’s safe to wager that his stats would rise.