The past couple of days, I’ve spewed a bunch of thoughts around the flaws I see in the ‘Just Get in’ and Rebuild strategies that we see prevalently around the NHL. Today, I’m proposing an alternative.
The ‘Just Get In’ strategy isn’t really a strategy at all. It drives short term decision making that isn’t necessarily connected from one decision to the next. The rebuild leads to a boom/bust cycle that has become well engrained in North American professional sports, the NHL included. It’s almost as if being awful for a while is considered a right of passage to becoming a great team.
I don’t think it has to be that way though. If we want to outsmart the best teams, we can’t simply copy their strategy. We need to improve on it. What if there was a way to build a sustainably competitive team? One that has peaks and valleys in performance, but the peaks are as a contender and the valleys are around the playoff bubble. This is what I think Regenerative Cohorts can achieve.
Age Brackets
Before we look at cohorts, we need to understand aging curves in the NHL. In my models, players peak in their mid to late 20s, with a period of 5-7 years where they have relatively stable impact. Younger players are developing and we can expect internal growth from them, while older players start to decline and we can expect some internal decline.
Based on the typical aging curves, we can set some general age brackets that cover the range of NHL player ages. Using four year age brackets gives us good delineation that fits nicely with typical aging curves and it also lines up relatively well with contract considerations.
| Age Range | Age Bracket | Contract Considerations |
| 19 and under | Future | Draft Picks and ELCs |
| 20-23 | Developing | ELCs, RFAs |
| 24-27 | Early Prime | RFAs with arbitration rights |
| 28-31 | Late Prime | UFAs |
| 32-35 | Veteran | UFAs |
| 36+ | Declining | UFAs, 35+ contracts |
Cohorts
One of the thought processes from the rebuilding mindset is that it’s ideal to have a group of players peak together. The theory is that doing so will help maximize the roster at a given point.
We’re going to take this thinking and fine tune it for Regenerative Cohorts. We’ll keep the goal of having a group of players peak together to maximize the roster. We’re also going to narrow the focus to four year groups and this is what’s going to allow us to create a more sustainable model for teambuilding.
We’re going to build a cohort starting from the Future age bracket, accumulating picks grouped within a 4 year span to do so. We’ll monitor the cohort as it develops to identify the best prospects within it that can field roughly half an NHL lineup when they are in their prime. Ideally, we end up with about 6 top nine forwards, 3 top four defensemen and 1 goaltender in the cohort when they reach Early Prime.
We have the other half of the lineup left to fill out and we want to do that with a mix of older and younger players. The ratio between them will shift as the prime age cohort moves through their best years. Initially, we’ll expect a larger number of older players to fill out the remaining spots as the prime aged cohort hits Early Prime. As the prime cohort moves into Late Prime, those veterans will be replaced by younger players.
So how will we manage that transition? By focusing on building cohorts that are eight years apart. After building the cohort that is now in the Early Prime age bracket, our attention shift to building a new cohort in the Future age bracket. Doing so will stock our prospect pipeline with a new cohort that is in the Developing age bracket when our first cohort reaches Late Prime. The second cohort supplies the younger roster players, who will take on increasingly larger roles until the second cohort is in Early Prime and they become the new focal point of the roster. Our first cohort will be sliding into the Veteran age bracket at that time and we can keep some of those players around to fill out the roster and provide veteran mentorship.
Wait. We skipped an age bracket when we built our second cohort. Yes, that was intentional. In order to consolidate assets to build our cohorts, we need to have some assets we’re willing to move on from. That age bracket in between our cohorts provides trade chips that we can use to group our cohorts into tight age groups. We can (and should) also look at trading players in the late prime and veteran age brackets while their value remains relatively high. As our cohorts age out of Late Prime, we want to trim the group to allow the new cohort entering Early Prime to take the roster spots (ideally, the new cohort is playing well enough to force our hand in that respect) and the returns on those trades can help stock the next cohort we’re building.
Following this approach to building cohorts that can chain together has the potential to be a more sustainable model for teambuilding than we typically see in the NHL. If done well, it can create sustainable waves of talent that can lead to long term continued success.
There are plenty of nuances that we can elaborate on within the Regenerative Cohort teambuilding approach but I’ll save those for another day.
