On Monday, the Tampa Bay Lightning caused a late July ruckus by signing goalie Andrei Vasilevskiy to an eight-year contract extension worth $9.5 million per season, for a total of $76 million. The contract includes a full no-movement clause for years two through five, and a modified no-trade clause for the final three years. In terms of structure, the deal contains a sizable amount of signing bonus money and is slightly front loaded, which will make it a more palatable buyout option. With Vasilevskiy turning 25 earlier this month, the deal will finish when he’s 33.
In terms of pure market value, Geo did a good job of showing that the Lightning paid about market price if not a little bit below on this deal. But the NHL contract market is inefficient, particularly for goalies. And that’s what makes this contract complicated.
Evaluating goalies
Let’s start with some honesty. We’re bad at evaluating goalies. All of us. And anyone who says they aren’t is selling something. Current state of the art metrics will at best give us a reasonable description of how a goalie performed over a certain time frame and a weak inkling of what they might do in the future. The sample size needed to have confidence that we’re measuring something meaningful in goalie performance is so large that it’s almost always the case the player is significantly different by the end of that sample than they were at the beginning. This is not the optimal environment in which to be making $76 million decisions.
If we’re going to make a good faith effort to measure goalie performance, we have to at least use the best data available. That means throwing wins and goals against average in the garbage. Those are team statistics. Wins are dependent on how many goals the skaters score. Goals against average is dependent on how many shots the skaters allow.
Even-save percentage needs to be left in 2005. We have information on shot locations, so measuring the percentage of shots a goalie saves without accounting for the location of those shots would be willfully negligent.
That brings us to goals save above expected, which tells us how many goals a goalie saved above what would be expected based on the quantity and quality of shots they faced.
How good is Vasilevskiy?
To answer the question in the header for this section: I don’t know. I just don’t. We have three good years of NHL data for the young Lightning star. He’s gotten better every year, which is encouraging. But the perception of him as one of the best goaltenders in the league based on his Vezina win isn’t always supported in the data.
As Geo noted in his article on the contract value, Vasilevskiy is on an historic trajectory in terms of early career accomplishments. He has back-to-back Vezina nominations before age 25 and one Vezina win. That’s better than just about any goalie in recent memory. In the real world of NHL contract negotiations, that makes him one of the most valuable netminders in the league.
Unfortunately, that Vezina win is probably due to him leading the league in wins and posting a high save percentage, which was also likely the reason he received a nomination in 2017-2018. Those are the things GMs have traditionally valued when voting for the award. Goals against average has also generally been important but Vasilevskiy finished tenth in that stat this season so maybe the GMs were willing to overlook it. In any case, those aren’t the stats we should be using to evaluate goaltenders.
If we look at goals saved above expected, the picture gets complicated. Last season, he was ninth overall at Evolving Hockey (seventh if we only include players with a starter’s workload). The year before that, he allowed more goals than expected putting him outside the top thirty. Over the last two seasons, Hockey Viz rates Vasilevskiy as a borderline top ten NHL goalie.
Cole Anderson’s work at Crowd Scout Sports is more favorable as is Peter Tanner’s at Moneypuck. Both of those sites had Vasilevskiy as arguably the best goalie in the league last season. The big difference between these two sites and those mentioned in the previous paragraph is that they include an adjustment for rebounds. That adjustment increases the quality of shots that Vasilevskiy faced according to those metrics and therefore, rates him higher.
Without getting too far into the weeds, all four of those sources have goals saved above expected stats that have merit and as far as I know, none of them have been proven significantly superior over the others.
If we plot Vasilevskiy’s rank among these various traditional and modern metrics, the picture doesn’t get any clearer. His rank here is among the top 31 goaltenders from last season in unblocked shots faced. Note that the Crowd Scout data includes the playoffs and at the end of the regular season, he ranked in the top three.
So what we have here is what we often get with goalie analysis: unsatisfactory answers.
The contract
If you think Vasilevskiy is the best goalie in the NHL at age 25 and likely to remain near the top of the heap for the next few years, then give him the big contract and have no regrets. If you think he has one season of top ten results following an uneven start to his career, this kind of contract is a nightmare. And the disconcerting thing is that I could make a strong case for either.
Goalies are the most important players on the ice. No skater can impact the outcome of the game in the way a goalie can. So of course, because hockey is a sport of suffering before all else, the most important position is also the most difficult to evaluate.
If you’re looking for clean answers from me, I don’t have them. I know an elite goalie is the most valuable thing a team can have. I have no idea how to determine if a goalie is elite. I’m confident Vasilevskiy is a top half of the league starter. I think he’s more than likely a top ten starter. I think the chances he’s a top five goalie are decent. He might even be the best in the league.
In order to justify a $76 million contract, he has to be in that top-five group at least. And that’s the rub. I’m not sure that with the data available I could ever be confident he is that and will continue to be that over even the first half of this contract.
This is where I have to give the caveat about publicly available data. The area where I think better tracking data will make the most difference is in goalie evaluation. I’m willing to concede that the Lightning might have better metrics internally that allow them more confidence in projecting Vasilevskiy’s future performance. But I’m also not comfortable resorting to an appeal to authority and calling it a day.
The alternatives
This deal is riddled with risk. Goalies are a crap shoot. If Vasilevskiy is one of the best goalies in the league over the next five years, this deal will be a steal. If he settles into somewhere in the eighth to twelfth range, the Lightning will be trying to find a way out when the no move clause expires after year five
This is a huge bet on a young star at the most important position fulfilling his potential. And as Geo showed, this was market value. If the Lightning wanted to sign him now, this was the price. The question is whether they should have been so eager to sign him this summer.
The team seems to be following their recent process of signing young stars to bridge deals and then extending them long term a year before those bridge deals end. That approach worked out perfectly for the team with Kucherov. Had they waited until this summer, that contract cost would have gone up following his Hart Trophy win. As great as Kuch already was, the Lightning probably still bought low by getting that deal done a year early.
Signing Vasilevskiy now runs the risk of being the opposite. Yes, if he earns another Vezina nomination or even wins it again, he would get even more expensive next summer. But that’s unlikely. A more likely scenario is that the team isn’t quite as good next year, Vasilevskiy’s traditional stats look a little worse, and he doesn’t get Vezina buzz. If that happens, the team might look back and realize they signed this extension at the peak of his value instead of waiting for his results to come back to a more reasonable level.
But even if that happened, we’d still be talking about a 26-year-old goalie with a Vezina win and a nomination. He wouldn’t suddenly become a six million dollar a year player. Maybe the contract could come down under nine million but even that isn’t guaranteed.
So eventually, whether this summer or next, this becomes a decision about whether you’re willing to pay market value for Vasilevskiy. If so, this or something similar is the cost. And if not? You have to trade him. Probably not now but likely next summer. Forcing your starting goalie into arbitration, entering the year with him on a one year deal, and then letting him walk in unrestricted free agency the following summer is not ideal for anyone. The team would be better off trading him so that they can recover some of the value and he can sign a long term extension with a new team.
But playing this scenario out further, if you shop him, do you end up in a better spot? No skater offers the same upside. So a trade would be about mitigating risk. Sacrifice some of the best case scenario in order to gain more certainty that you avoid the worst case scenario. I’m not opposed to that idea but I think pulling off that kind of trade is much easier said than done. Not many teams are looking to throw nine to ten million dollars per year at a goaltender. And in that limited pool of potential trade partners, finding a fit would be difficult.
A trade like that would also have ramifications on the team dynamic. The players all think Vasilevskiy is the best goalie in the world. That’s part of the team’s core identity. Shipping him out because paying him is perceived as too risky would require some finesse by the front office and coaching staff to help the rest of the team understand why this was the right move. And no matter how well they explain it, nothing is going to make the rest of the players feel good about it when they see whoever would take over in net. Because that player won’t be as good as Vasilevskiy.
The Lightning have no goalies in their pipeline that are close to NHL ready so the team would be looking to free agency or a trade to acquire a replacement. This season’s budget offseason goalie options were Cam Talbot, Petr Mrazek, and Robin Lehner. Last summer’s were Cam Ward, Jaroslav Halak, and Anton Khudobin. Could a player like that have a decent season? Sure. But they can also tank and leave you scrambling all year to find someone reliable. For a team that plans to be Cup contender for the next five years at least, that’s a huge risk to take.
And when you start totaling up all the risk that comes from not signing Vasilevskiy: the impact on the team psyche, the potential lack of return value in a trade, the inability to find a sufficient replacement at a significant savings, well, the risk of not signing him starts to look not so dissimilar to the risk of signing him.
Wrap up
In some ways, the Lightning were boxed into a corner by Vasilevskiy’s stellar start to his career. He played on a great team, he put up the traditional metrics that are valued in the goalie market, and he won the hardware that gets net minders paid. In the current market, Vasy is worth $9.5 million per year. The question is whether being the team to pay him that is a blessing or a curse.
If I have one specific gripe with this contract, the timing is it. They didn’t have to do this now. They could have waited until next summer. Maybe he has another similar season and the cost increases. Maybe he has a bit of a down year and the cost dips. But given how hard evaluating goalies is, taking as much time as possible to make a decision would seem to have been the prudent move in this case.
And when the time did come to make that decision, I think the Lightning would have been smart to explore every option including potentially trading him, as bizarre as that might sound. I think the inherent volatility in goaltending performance would force me to consider replacing his cap hit with more stable production from skaters. But even then, I’m not convinced the trade market would have materialized in a way that makes moving on from him worthwhile.
And so here we are. Of all the big contracts for the Lightning core, this one carries the most risk. If it goes right, the number 88 could hang in the rafters. But if it goes wrong, this could be a deal that makes an already tenuous salary cap situation untenable.
