Hockey Outsider
Registered User
- Jan 16, 2005
- 9,166
- 14,499
Objective & scope
I wanted to see if it's possible to develop a model that predicts the salaries of restricted free agents ("RFA") and unrestricted free agents ("UFA"). As always, my goal is to present data in a way that's objective, transparent, and (hopefully) interesting.
Parameters
My analysis is based on the 2019 off-season, and I'm limiting it to forwards who played at least one NHL game in the prior season (2018-19). There were 134 such forwards (64 RFA's and 90 UFA's). The median number of games that these forwards played in the previous season was 68.
I excluded goalies because there aren't many transactions, so we'd run into sample size issues. I excluded defensemen because defense isn't particularly well-measured statistically, and would therefore be more difficult to capture in a formula.
Note that I'm trying to predict "incremental" salary - that is, salary over the NHL minimum of $700K. For example, Par Lindholm's contract had a cap hit of $850K, so his incremental salary is $150K.
I wanted to see if it's possible to develop a model that predicts the salaries of restricted free agents ("RFA") and unrestricted free agents ("UFA"). As always, my goal is to present data in a way that's objective, transparent, and (hopefully) interesting.
Parameters
My analysis is based on the 2019 off-season, and I'm limiting it to forwards who played at least one NHL game in the prior season (2018-19). There were 134 such forwards (64 RFA's and 90 UFA's). The median number of games that these forwards played in the previous season was 68.
I excluded goalies because there aren't many transactions, so we'd run into sample size issues. I excluded defensemen because defense isn't particularly well-measured statistically, and would therefore be more difficult to capture in a formula.
Note that I'm trying to predict "incremental" salary - that is, salary over the NHL minimum of $700K. For example, Par Lindholm's contract had a cap hit of $850K, so his incremental salary is $150K.
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