There are a lot of factors that go into building a Stanley Cup roster, from good drafting to strong NHL scouting to having the right head coach and system in place.
Managing the salary cap is also a huge part of it.
Every team is looking for bargains when it acquires a new player. And the more players you can get for below market value, the more flexibility you have in building out the rest of your roster and the more impact players you can eventually add.
If you get some bad contracts, though, it can quickly cause problems for building the best possible team.
This article is about those deals. We are going to take a look at the worst contracts for all 32 NHL teams during the 2023-24 season.
It is important to keep in mind that “bad contract” does not always mean “bad player.” There are some really good players on this list, but their production or impact simply might not match their salary cap number any longer.
There are also some teams that have done such a good job managing their salary cap that you really have to reach to find their “worst” contract.
The $6 million question here is whether John Gibson’s decline over the past few years has been the result of his overall play slipping to a point of no return or the result of having to carry a massive workload behind a rebuilding team that has been one of the league’s worst.
A combination of the two factors is probably the most likely answer.
The 30-year-old is still owed $6.4 million per season over the next three years while having a modified no-movement clause.
He has not had a save percentage higher than .904 since the 2018-19 season and has been below .900 over the past two seasons.
At his peak, Gibson was one of the best goalies in the league. He has not been that player for a long time, which might make it extremely difficult for the Ducks to move that contract.
It’s tough to nail down a “worst contract” here because the Coyotes really don’t have that many long-term deals. And the ones they do have are pretty decent.
Nobody is going to complain about Clayton Keller making over $7 million per year because he is a bona fide top-line scorer. Lawson Crouse and Nick Schmaltz are pretty productive for what they are paid. They have been no long-term commitments on defense beyond this season (no defensemen are signed beyond this season), and their goalies make peanuts.
So who is left?
Kerfoot isn’t a bad player by any stretch, and his contract isn’t awful, but it might be the worst of a pretty mediocre bunch of deals.
In all honesty, though, if this is your team’s bad contract, you probably don’t have many, if any.
This is another tough one because the Bruins typically do a decent job managing their salary cap, and they don’t have any truly bad contracts anywhere on the roster.
So, calling Brandon Carlo a “worst contract” is probably something of a stretch. But we have to pick somebody here, and he might be the closest thing there is to one simply because he is having a down year.
His overall defensive impacts have taken a bit of a hit this season with his expected goals share and expected goals against numbers being among the worst of his career, and he has never really been much of an offensive threat.
Is it a one-year blip and something the 27-year-old can bounce back from next season?
The Bruins still owe him $4.1 million per season over the next three years, and if his defensive impacts do not rebound next year, that could be a tough contract to have on the books.
Not a cap-killer by any means, but it’s certainly not a bargain.
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