After the “Last Dance” President’s Trophy season, the Boston Bruins have officially entered Cap Hell. While the current CapFriendly roster is more of a back of the napkin look during the offseason, when carrying over $4.5 million in performance bonuses from Patrice Bergeron and David Krejci, the Bruins only have ~$5 million in cap space with seven forwards, seven defensemen, and a goalie signed. In other words, the Bruins are going to be forced to make moves and tough decisions in order to ice a reasonable team next season.
The unrestricted free agents such as Tyler Bertuzzi, Garnet Hathaway, and Connor Clifton will have the ability to seek a higher bidder, which they should ultimately find in such a weak free agent class.
Asked an NHL team exec about the 2023 unrestricted free agent class:
"It's fucking awful."
-Greg Wyshynski on Twitter (@wyshynski)
The two restricted free agents, Trent Frederic and Jeremy Swayman, offer a bit more complexity for the Bruins. The restricted categorization means that the Bruins are given some rights to control the player’s destination negotiated in the Collective Bargaining Agreement between the National Hockey League and its Players' Association. The rights that the Bruins have include the right to make a qualifying offer, the right to take the players to arbitration if said qualifying offer occurs and is not accepted, as well as the opportunity to either match another team's signed offer (offer sheet) or receive compensation for the player’s exit. Therefore, the players, whose only rights are to take the team to arbitration, can only leave if the Bruins are willing to let them and another team is willing to pay the Bruins to acquire them.
The Bruins will likely not be in any rush to get these deals done, and the players will likely use arbitration as a tool to ensure the process doesn’t ride into training camp.
With the Bruins ability to afford these players in question (welcome to Cap Hell), interest for them around the league may pick up. On Friday evening, a St. Louis Blues reporter put out a tweet expressing this for the St. Louis-native, Trent Frederic.
Boston forward Trent Frederic is an interesting player to pay attn to. An attractive player for a team looking to add size. Boston up against the cap, will need to move some money. Headed to Arb with Bruins if contract isn’t agreed to beforehand. Several teams paying close attn.
-Andy Strickland on Twitter (@andystrickland)
Let’s start with discussing the 6-foot-3 forward then. Unsurprisingly, the first place I go to look is Evolving-Hockey.com for his contract projection. Luke did an amazing job (in my opinion) to visualize the salary given the term and the probability of each term.
Intuitively, you were probably thinking that Frederic would sign a short-term deal with a rather low average annual value (“AAV”) - and you’d be right. The twenty-five-year-old is due for a raise from his previous two-year contract which had an AAV of $1.05 million. However, that raise will still leave Frederic in the pay range of a bottom-six forward. If there wasn’t a cap crunch, the Bruins would likely be able to extend Frederic without any consideration. But the Bruins are in Cap Hell and must operate within those bounds.
Where I potentially offer a unique insight or an alternative point of view, is how I think about managing players and the cap. Perhaps the most important lesson I took on my path to my MBA is that there really is no formula for business success as the world is ever-changing. In real life, we are entering a world of high inflation, high interest rates, changes in supply chains, the frontier of artificial intelligence, and more. Where the world will sit in five years, I couldn’t tell you and neither could anyone else. The same exists in hockey. Public analytics models are slowly evolving, “traditionalists” are beginning to adapt to analytics which is changing their views of the game and insights, the salary cap is going to adjust based on the change in revenues along with the cooperation of different parties, and more.
The key ingredient to success in business, sport, and life is managing through uncertainty. That’s also the lesson you should take from the Golden Knights Stanley Cup win, not the size of their defensemen or speed up front.
The way most of us naturally view the world is with one future in mind. You may think to yourself, “Trent Frederic is a third line winger, to which he should be paid as such.” Okay, maybe the last part is a bit formal. You may also think, “He’s the Bruins third line center with Bergeron gone, and $2.3 million for a third line center is great value.” That’s what I would call your base case.
A base case, at least in financial terms, is the scenario that is most likely to play out in the eyes of management. However, there are factors, some completely out of management’s control, that could affect the future. While your evaluation of a player’s talent is the main factor in whether or not your base case plays out, Frederic could also get into an off-ice accident this summer that he never fully recovers from as an example.
I think the simplest way to cover your bases (no pun intended) is to create five cases: worst case, bear case, base case, bull case, and best case. The base case is what you think is most likely to happen. The bear case is one step down while the bull case is one step up. And the best and worst case are what they sound like. Designate some meaning to that and apply some reasonable probabilities. Here’s how I see Frederic:
The salary ranges derive from Dom Luszczyszyn work at The Athletic. If I were to give a short summary, I’d say I see Trent Frederic as a fourth liner with more upside than downside. To start the 2022-23 season, his base case was probably a depth forward with foreseeable upside as a fourth liner and some chance of being a third liner or better. After all, he was a scratch on night one in Washington in October. With a tremendous season playing firmly as a third liner on a good team (high-ranging third liner), I think the expectation rises that he is solidly a fourth liner with a higher likelihood of him continuing to be a third liner or better than for him to fall off the face of the earth and be worse than someone in Providence.
In order for the new salary to be worth it, you would need to increase my expectations for Frederic and set the base case to third liner or above. The reason I believe the base case is only a fourth liner, is that he has only proven to be a third liner in a relatively short period of time over the course of six professional seasons.
I will stop myself here before I make the case to move Frederic even if he’s a true third liner, or before I explore asymmetric risk and case studies surrounding that. Ultimately, if there are teams interested in compensating the Bruins for the rights to Trent Frederic, they should listen at the very least.
I hope that Frederic finds success in Boston or somewhere else. He’s incredibly likeable and is entertaining to watch. From a managerial perspective, he may have more market value than he’s worth, and the Bruins are in desperate need of replenishing assets after making runs all these years.