After 2,248 games in Pittsburgh, Kris Letang and Evgeni Malkin’s hockey futures in the city are up in the air for the first legitimate time in their professional careers.
As Josh Yohe reported Wednesday, general manager Ron Hextall has a total of $23.2 million available in salary cap space to fill out his roster heading into next season. That number conceivably includes space for new deals with both Letang and Malkin, a pair that cost the Penguins $16.74 million per year against the cap on their previous contracts. That number makes the $23.2 million in cap space seem very tight when considering the Penguins’ other needs. Signing Letang and Malkin while improving elsewhere is a tall task that might seem impossible.
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With all the conjecture around what deals for Letang and Malkin should look like, let’s look to contract projection experts and see what we come up with — today, we’ll lean on Evolving Hockey.
Because Yohe labeled Letang the bigger challenge in keeping the core together, let’s start with his projection and some comparable contracts.
Courtesy of the collaboration between JFresh and the All Three Zones project, we can use player microstat cards to give us a player’s performance in various buckets as a percentile ranking among league defensemen. This is a comprehensive view of the player’s ability to drive offense, prevent chances via preventing zone entries and all sorts of behavior that helps a team at both ends of the ice.
When it comes to driving offense, Letang outperforms about 80-plus percent of the league on average. There are gaps in his defensive performance, most notably in his ability to prevent opposing forwards from carrying the puck into the offensive zone. This is right in line with the eye test. Letang’s offensive numbers are a result of taking chances offensively and leaving gaps on the back end if those opportunities don’t work out, allowing for a higher rate of entries against on the back end.
A look at HockeyViz backs that up: Letang drives offense and is at a break-even point defensively. Areas of red denote locations where, while Letang was on the ice, the Penguins took or allowed an excess of shots relative to the league average. Blue is indicative of areas where they took or allowed fewer shots relative to league average while Letang was on the ice.
With Letang on the ice, the Penguins get a 9 percent bump to their ability to create quality shots. On the flip side, Letang’s impact defensively is 1 percent in the wrong direction.
Letang still drives play well offensively. His performance defensively is mostly fine, save for his ability to prevent clean zone entries and some areas of risk in the high slot. Overall, he’s still a rarity among defensemen with his contributions on offense.
Yohe suggested Letang likely seeks a raise on his current deal of $7.3 million, and the projection from Evolving Hockey agrees. The site projects a three-year contract with an $8.856 million cap hit. That would be $1.556 million more than his previous contract.
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This contract alone would take a third of Hextall’s available cap space, and it would pay Letang handsomely through his 38th birthday. This contract also considers his offensive numbers and the fact he just played almost a full season at 35. The market for defensemen is lucrative, and The Athletic’s Dom Luczyszyn has Letang at a market value of $10.7 million based on performance alone, suggesting the Penguins could potentially get his services at a discount compared to the open market.
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There really aren’t a ton of contract comparables for Letang — not surprising, as there aren’t a lot of defensemen who historically perform this well this late into their careers. The closest thing to his dollar amount is Andrei Markov signing with the Canadiens back in 2014, and even then, we’re several million dollars off the mark.
It’s a lot to pay, but that money may not seem so extreme when you consider Letang can routinely take shifts like the one in the clip below, a clear example of how he can excel at driving play in both directions.
Assuming Hextall signs Letang to this deal, he would be looking at $14.3 million in available space to sign Malkin and five additional players to round the roster out to 23 total.
Let’s move on to Malkin’s projection and see what our tool says about his next contract. Again, this prediction will focus on Malkin re-signing with the Penguins specifically.
Just as with Letang, microstat performance cards from JFresh and All Three Zones can give us a better sense of Malkin’s recent performance across several zones.
This was tougher to digest as Malkin clearly took some time to fully rebound from a knee injury.
There are areas here where Malkin looks absolutely dominant and some areas where traditionally strong offensive performances seem to be missing entirely. The lack of zone entries stands out. Carrying the puck across the offensive blue line is a traditional area of strength for Malkin, but he struggled this season — likely a symptom of his knee injury and recovery from it.
Entry struggles aside, Malkin is still one of the best in the business at operating in the center lane of the offensive zone and creating opportunities for teammates in dangerous scoring areas.
We can look at Malkin’s performance differently through the lens of Evolving Hockey’s Regularized Adjusted Plus/Minus, or RAPM.
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You’ve likely seen these charts on Twitter before. The simplest explanation is that they use linear regression to account for factors outside of a player’s control; things such as quality of teammate, quality of opponent, the starting point on the ice and many other environmental elements. This removes that noise to give us a more accurate look at a player’s on-ice results expressed as a rating relative to players at their same position during the same timeframe. The left chart shows even strength, the right shows power play.
These results track with the eye test and the microstat table above this. Malkin is still very good on the power play and scored goals at a higher rate relative to players at his position, but he didn’t wholly control play at even strength for most of his time back in the lineup.
Defensively speaking, Malkin didn’t hemorrhage shots against, but the quality of the chances against the Penguins with Malkin on the ice was higher relative to his peers.
This makes his next contract projection a somewhat unfriendly endeavor. As Yohe reported, Malkin is willing to take a pay cut, but how low is he willing to go to stay in Pittsburgh? The Evolving Wild contract projection has Malkin signing a one-year extension at $4.280 million to stay in Pittsburgh.
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Though we struggled to come up with high-quality comparables for Letang, that isn’t a problem for Malkin. Ryan Getzlaf’s contract from 2021 is 78 percent comparable to Malkin’s current situation and projection.
What aspect of the model made Malkin’s contract number so much lower than Letang’s? I wrote Josh and Luke Younggren from Evolving Hockey, who jumped in and took a look. If you want the dirt, there’s no better place to go than the proprietors of the model itself.
“Malkin is very much in a position where few players have been in our model,” the twins wrote me back. “The biggest thing we’re seeing when digging into his numbers is the missed time over the last three seasons. Our model uses a weighted average of numerous box score metrics over the past three seasons (games played, time on ice percentage, goals, points, blocks, penalties, etc.) to predict both the dollar amount and term. Signing age, contract status and position type are very impactful as well.
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“Looking into forwards in the past who have signed within 4 to 6 percent of the cap and are over 32 years old, there aren’t a ton of them. In Cap Friendly’s data, only 26 players fit these criteria. Of these, no player at the time of their contract signing averaged fewer games than Malkin over the last three seasons.”
So, missed time is a major knock against Malkin. The projection balances Malkin’s missed time against, when healthy, his strong offensive ability. Age and missed time are hard on Malkin’s projection.
Signing Malkin for $4.280 million would leave $10.02 million to round out the rest of the Penguins roster. It’s unlikely Hextall could do that without cutting expenses elsewhere, but it stands to reason he may be interested in moving some of that dead weight anyway.
The Letang and Malkin projections would cost the Penguins $13.136 million per year, a savings of $3.604 million off the stars’ previous contracts.
Would Hextall commit that amount to Letang for three years? Would Malkin accept a contract that much lower?
We know Hextall’s desire is to retain Malkin and Letang, but can the Penguins find common ground to make it work for all parties involved?
(Photo: Andre Ringuette / Freestyle Photo / Getty Images)
