NHL Organization Outlook Cards
I made these cards because I've always wanted an easy way to see an overview of a team's outlook. A one-pager that shows what stage of the competitive cycle they are in, forecasting their cap and asset management in relation to their performance.
Why?
It’s become increasingly apparent that the teams that consistently stay disciplined in their approach to the salary cap and draft pick capital are the teams that give themselves the best chance for success in the NHL.
So let’s go over how to read these cards.
At the top of the card lives the organization’s rank amongst the 31 other NHL clubs in various categories.
5-Year PTS% Rank
The organization’s points percentage over the past five seasons tells the story of their recent on-ice results.
Asset Pipeline Quantity Rank
This ranks the quantity of draft picks the organization made in the past five drafts.
Asset Pipeline Quality Rank
This takes Dom Luszczyszyn’s draft pick value model and sums the expected value of the draft picks the organization made in the past five drafts.
Draft Pick Capital Rank
Draft capital is the number of draft picks the organization owns in the future. This ranks the quantity of draft picks that the organization possesses in the next four drafts.
% of 2026 Cap Used
This is meant to show how flexible an organization is under the 2025-26 projected salary cap of $92,000,000.
The line charts plot the organization’s performance, drafting, and roster cost over the past five seasons.
5-Year Performance - Points Percentage
The red line tells the story of the team’s points percentage, season by season. The grey dotted reference line denotes a .580 points percentage. Over 82 games this equates to a 96-point team which is usually the magic number for the playoffs.
5-Year Performance - Drafting
The blue line shows how many draft picks were made and the dotted blue line is the baseline that every team starts with; seven draft picks. This quickly shows if a team was operating under a draft pick surplus or deficit.
The orange line shows the quality of picks made in those seasons. For example, the Carolina Hurricanes made 13 picks in the 2021 draft but traded away their first-round pick. The quality graph gives a bit more context to the quality of talent drafted that season. The dotted orange line shows the draft pick value of a team that finished with the 16th worst record and only made their original seven draft picks.
5-Year Performance - Salary Cap
The green line shows how much salary the team has spent, expressed as a percentage of the salary cap. If a team uses more than 100% of the salary cap, that means they used LTIR that season.
Draft Pick Capital Bar Graph
Year by year, this graph shows the quantity of draft picks the organization has in green and red to easily show a surplus or deficit.
Future Cap Commitment Bar Graph
The future cap commitment chart shows how locked into the roster the team is until 2025-26. The future salary caps are projections from CapFriendly.
As this is the first go at a project like this, there are some limitations.
While it does show the team’s past performance, it doesn’t show the strength of the current roster or the average age of the roster. I made a conscious decision to leave the age out but perhaps in a future iteration, age will be included.
The asset pipeline rankings are just a snapshot and don’t take into account what happens to these assets after the draft. Do these picks hit or are they busts? Maybe they are traded.
But that isn’t really the exercise here. The asset pipeline is just a currency for NHL teams to use to either improve their roster and their accumulation of assets reflects their war chest. I will go into the asset pipeline in a future article.
The salary cap outlook is fairly simple and looks at it from 10,000 feet. It doesn’t get into the weeds. Are they efficient contracts, distressed assets, no movement clauses, LTIR salary, etc?
If you would like to play around with these cards, you can find them here.