It's exciting to watch for all the new signings that occur every year after the July 1 free-agent deadline, but one team's new arrival is another team's departure. Which teams have the most pending unrestricted free agents (UFAs) ready to pack their bags?
Hockey analytics can be used to estimate the value of every pending UFA. For example, Hockey Prospectus provides a catch-all statistics called Goals Versus Threshold. GVT, much like baseball's WAR, approximates all of a player's offensive and defensive contributions at a high level, no matter if they're a high-scoring forward, a shut-down defenseman or even a goalie.
I calculated a weighted GVT average of the past three seasons for each UFA, with each year being twice as important as the previous. In this way, the past is considered but doesn't matter as much as each player's current scoring totals.
Using the list of unrestricted free agents posted on Cap Geek, which is the source of all cap-related data in this article, I totaled up the entire impact of each team's UFAs in terms of goals scored and/or prevented in order to identify the league's top 10.
The a ...
Read Full Article at Bleacher Report - NHL
Article written by Rob Vollman
NHL Teams That Will Be Hit Hardest by Free Agency in 2014 Offseason
March 25th, 2014 by Rob Vollman Leave a reply »
Advertisement