From the Colorado Avalanche to the Montreal Canadiens, each National Hockey League franchise has its own trajectory.
Some teams are in the process of rebuilding and developing players; others freeze more veteran rosters, chasing shorter-term glory. Available talent and league economics dictate much of a team’s position in its trajectory; the rest is filled with sober assessments of future productivity by front offices.
We spend so much time talking about rebuilds and retools and building championship contenders that we sometimes lose the forest for the trees. I am certainly guilty of this. So, I wanted to take a step back and look at the 32 franchises based on their position in the development cycle, with player age being the area of focus.
Player age tends to be a fantastic gauge of where teams are in their cycles – younger NHL teams give us little confidence in their performance floor, but also give us a lot of confidence in to future benefits. The oldest teams in the NHL work backwards: we have a clear idea of what we’re getting for baseline performance, but incremental player performance gains are fleeting.
Let’s divide the 32 franchises into three categories:
- Early-stage teams, which skew youngsters into their roster
- Mid-point teams, where roster ages consolidate around peak performance years
- Late-stage teams, where roster ages lean toward the twilight years of NHL careers
The constituents of each team include (a) every player who has recorded at least one NHL minute in 2022-23; and (b) injured players. The average NHL roster is approximately 27.3 years, with a standard deviation of 1.0 years. This gives us appropriate age categories for the three groups and will also show us where the seven Canadian teams fall.
Let’s start with our teams in the start-up phase. Here we are looking for one standard deviation below the league average age. The Buffalo Sabers have the youngest roster in hockey, but notably, this group includes a Canadian team – the Vancouver Canucks:
It’s hard to think of Vancouver as a young roster, given the playoff expectations surrounding the team and the extreme strain it’s been under from a series of poor roster decisions over the years. . But a number of their most important players – starting with Elias Pettersson and including names like Quinn Hughes and Vasily Podkolzin – are still very early in their respective careers. Notably, very few Canucks players are knocking on the door of retirement. If we break Vancouver’s roster down into three categories (in which rookies are referred to as under 24; and late players are referred to as skaters over 30), they stack up accordingly:
The intermediate category is larger and includes 17 teams. You have a lot of diversity in this group because of its size – Canadian teams like the Ottawa Senators and the Montreal Canadiens lean heavily towards the younger side of things and still consider good amounts of upside, whereas the Western Conference regular powerhouses like the St. Louis Blues and Vegas Golden Knights are about to be called old.
The Edmonton Oilers, Toronto Maple Leafs and Winnipeg Jets are all near league average – inside their peak, with roughly a fair number of aging players in the roster at as they age out of alignment:
I want to focus on two rival teams, the Ottawa Senators and the Toronto Maple Leafs. They form a fascinating contrast in the sense that a team has just entered the period when expectations should be higher – the Senators’ reconstruction is complete and most of the core they have driven out through player acquisitions and in the repechage are playing good minutes. This is no longer a super young team:
For virtually all of Ottawa’s rebuild (2017-22), Toronto froze a contender who tore up most regular seasons. If Ottawa has the hallmarks of a rookie team in transition, Toronto has the hallmarks of a team that should be fighting now:
Compare those two rosters to Pittsburgh, which is the oldest roster in the league (thanks to Mark Giordano for spoiling Toronto’s distribution).
The late stage team roster only has seven teams, and if I asked you to name those seven teams before showing you the roster, I bet the consensus opinion would be very close to the truth. The Penguins and Washington Capitals ice the oldest rosters you’ll find in the league, and that makes sense — both organizations have tried to keep Sidney Crosby and Alexander Ovechkin’s competitive windows open for as long as possible.
Here are those seven teams, including the Calgary Flames:
The Flames aren’t freezing a particularly old roster, but they effectively don’t have any young players in high roster spots right now. Forward Dillon Dube (24) is the youngest significant player on the roster — for comparison, the Sabers can face 13 players 24 or younger right now.
Here is the Calgary stack, for reference:
Carolina is interesting to juxtapose against Calgary. Unlike the Flames, the Hurricanes have several spots filled by young and developing players, including Andrei Svechnikov, Jesperi Kotkaniemi, Martin Necas and Seth Jarvis. But they also filled the rest of their roster with players looking for glory towards the end of their careers. Just this offseason, Carolina added Paul Stastny (36) and Brent Burns (37), and rotated a pair of mid-30s goaltenders in Frederik Andersen and Antti Raanta:
Although Carolina and Calgary have the roster composition required to provide high performance teams today, our confidence in Carolina’s ability to sustain it is higher than Calgary’s. The Hurricanes have players to replace over the next two years, but help is readily available. Calgary will look to its prospect pool – a pool that seems relatively devoid of NHL-ready talent.
I hope you found this as fascinating as I did!
Data via Hockey Reference, NHL.com, Evolving Hockey, Natural Stat Trick
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