Does Doughty have the worst contract in the NHL?

[Axl Rhoadz]

The Athletic seems to think so...

By the numbers: The NHL’s 10 worst contracts, 2020 edition

Click to read more...

 

[KingTech]

The Athletic seems to think so...

By the numbers: The NHL’s 10 worst contracts, 2020 edition

Can u sum up the article for thoses of us to cheap to pay for it? like main points of it

 

[Axl Rhoadz]

Can u sum up the article for thoses of us to cheap to pay for it? like main points of it

>>1. Drew Doughty, LAK
Contract: $11M x seven years
Surplus Value: -$58.7M
Positive Value Probability: 0.4 percent
When I did this exercise last year, having Drew Doughty on the list, let alone at No. 2, felt like it would be controversial. He was only a year removed from a 60-point season and had finished second in Norris Trophy voting. But he hasn’t been the same since. In 2018-19, he was worth 0.1 wins, and it’s what caused his standing to plummet. There was hope for a bounce-back the following season and while he was better, it wasn’t by enough; he was worth 0.5 wins per 82 games, still only second pairing quality.
Doughty simply doesn’t push play anymore. Some might argue it’s because the team around him stinks, and that’s fair, but part of the reason it stinks is because the best players aren’t looking the part when they’re on the ice. With a 47.7 percent expected goals rate, Doughty was only better than Kurtis MacDermid among regular defenders … and the rest were above 50 percent. That’s a sizeable gap and it was a similar story the year prior when Doughty was a 44.3 percent, last among Kings regulars.
It’s now two straight seasons Doughty hasn’t played like a legitimate top pairing option and it’s fair to wonder if that version is ever coming back. But what makes his contract the league’s worst is not that he’s not projected to be a top pairing defender, or even a true No. 1, it’s that he’s paid to be one of the league’s very best defencemen. At $11 million AAV, the expectation is 2.6 wins on average over the next seven seasons and 2.75 wins this upcoming season. There are only five defenders projected to perform above that mark next year and Doughty isn’t one of them. So say what you will about the model being wrong or about Doughty still being good – the issue is that it takes a lot of suspension of disbelief to say he’s anywhere close to being a top five defender. He’s only getting worse going into his 30s, so that negative surplus value compounds further as the years go on.<<

 

[BringTheReign]

We can say that it's because he had no motivation on a bad roster, but Doughty has been plain bad the last 2 years, whether by eye test or analytics. The majority of this board wouldn't bat an eye in acknowledging that Roy and Walker were just plain better than Doughty last year.

I have a Doughty jersey, I love Drew, and I am optimistic he can turn it around be a #1 guy well into his late 30s, but it's also hard to argue for that future with anything other than hope given the last 2 seasons. He is the 2nd highest paid defenseman in the league, and one of the highest paid players in general.

 

[KingTech]

I think time on ice also has a lot to do with it. He is one of the highest time on ice in the nhl playing in every possible situation. I really think less time on ice would help true become the top 5 defenseman he was / is

 

[head eyes]

I'm still confident Doughty will regain his game. He thrives when things are competitive, so when things aren't, he just goes through the motions. It can be a detriment when things aren't going well, which they haven't, but when things get competitive, for instance the games against the Flames/Tkachuk, Doughty was one of the best player on the ice.

 

[Matt13]

I called out Drew Doughty a number of years ago as a player who was not physically fit. Some people shot that down since he is able to skate 30 minutes a night, and I get it. My main issue wasn't with the 25 year old with natural abilities to do that but with the work ethic outside of the rink to stay at that level.

The Black and White episode from a few years ago to me was telling of his lack of preparedness for a long career. Drew is featured in the beginning walking in, looking lost, drinking coffee while everyone else has shots of them working hard and sweating.




Is it a lack of motivation to play well, or a lack of preparedness as father time sets in? Either answer is not ok for a guy making a $11,000,000 a year. I think it will be a steady decline. I hope I am wrong.

 

[kingsboy11]

Lol not even remotely close to the worst contract. I'd still take Drew over most Defenseman in the NHL simply because we all know what he's capable of when he's at his best.

 

[Lt Dan]

Doughty has definitely been mailing it in

Not making excuses but he is likely very frustrated. His partners keep getting worse and worse and he wants to win.
Hopefully he can realize that this team is at about the 2009 level and there will be some chances to win again in a few seasons

 

[Bandit]

The one place where Karlsson magically doesn’t have him beat somehow. Yeah sure.

 

[Lt Dan]

The one place where Karlsson magically doesn’t have him beat somehow. Yeah sure.

 

[DoktorJeep]

The Doughty contract is the biggest piece of evidence that points to Blake being a bad GM. His decisions at the NHL level are terrible. He decided to pay Doughty, Pearson, Toffoli, Kovy and Dion big money, and got brutal results from them.

Two of them are dead cap space for 3 more seasons, and the other two forwards returned zero immediates of value.

It remains to be seen how he well he does now that they’ve made serious moves to rebuild. I’m skeptical when I read management indicate they expect to return to the playoffs with Doughty and Kopitar leading the way.

 

[Butch 19]

I called out Drew Doughty a number of years ago as a player who was not physically fit. Some people shot that down since he is able to skate 30 minutes a night, and I get it. My main issue wasn't with the 25 year old with natural abilities to do that but with the work ethic outside of the rink to stay at that level.

The Black and White episode from a few years ago to me was telling of his lack of preparedness for a long career. Drew is featured in the beginning walking in, looking lost, drinking coffee while everyone else has shots of them working hard and sweating.


Is it a lack of motivation to play well, or a lack of preparedness as father time sets in? Either answer is not ok for a guy making a $11,000,000 a year. I think it will be a steady decline. I hope I am wrong.

hmmm, a little harsh don't ya think?

All that from a few minute clip? And I think you were watching Brownie in the clip, not Drew.

And coffee should be out?? LOL

 

[tny760]

arguably the worst d corps in the NHL, playing the most minutes, better defensively than the revered karlsson/burns/vlasic sharks? worst contract in the NHL? yeah right

i'm not gonna sit here and tell you he's the best but come the f*** on..

 

[Matt13]

hmmm, a little harsh don't ya think?

All that from a few minute clip? And I think you were watching Brownie in the clip, not Drew.

And coffee should be out?? LOL

I doubt he will be upset by my comments.

I know the difference between Brown and Doughty. They both walked in with cups of coffee. However Brown is also shown working hard, multiple times. It shows lots of players with lesser abilities working hard to elevate their game. I just don't see that intensity with Drew.

Time will tell.

 

[Ziggy Stardust]

The Doughty contract is the biggest piece of evidence that points to Blake being a bad GM. His decisions at the NHL level are terrible. He decided to pay Doughty, Pearson, Toffoli, Kovy and Dion big money, and got brutal results from them.

Two of them are dead cap space for 3 more seasons, and the other two forwards returned zero immediates of value.

It remains to be seen how he well he does now that they’ve made serious moves to rebuild. I’m skeptical when I read management indicate they expect to return to the playoffs with Doughty and Kopitar leading the way.

How was the Toffoli deal a bad one considering the return he got for him? Same goes for the Pearson contract, which doesn't look so bad now. He performed so poorly it hurt his trade value, but I guess that's Blake's fault? What immediate value should he have gotten? You seem to have all the answers that you're hiding from us.

He also didn't sign Phaneuf, that was a swap of bad contracts with Ottawa. Kovalchuk was a short term plan that didn't work out and his cap hit is gone after this season. Blake actually managed to create a ton of cap flexibility over the years. I guess that's also an easy thing to do, right? Especially for a bad decision maker. What are the other cap hits you made up that are going to be with the team for three plus seasons?

Your post is evidence that you just hold a grudge against Blake for irrational reasons. You probably still boo him when you hear his name.

 

[Bandit]

arguably the worst d corps in the NHL, playing the most minutes, better defensively than the revered karlsson/burns/vlasic sharks? worst contract in the NHL? yeah right

i'm not gonna sit here and tell you he's the best but come the f*** on..

Pretty much this.

 

[kilowatt]

How was the Toffoli deal a bad one considering the return he got for him? Same goes for the Pearson contract, which doesn't look so bad now. He performed so poorly it hurt his trade value, but I guess that's Blake's fault? What immediate value should he have gotten? You seem to have all the answers that you're hiding from us.

He also didn't sign Phaneuf, that was a swap of bad contracts with Ottawa. Kovalchuk was a short term plan that didn't work out and his cap hit is gone after this season. Blake actually managed to create a ton of cap flexibility over the years. I guess that's also an easy thing to do, right? Especially for a bad decision maker. What are the other cap hits you made up that are going to be with the team for three plus seasons?

Your post is evidence that you just hold a grudge against Blake for irrational reasons. You probably still boo him when you hear his name.

I was going to post something in response but this pretty much sums it up. Blake turned Toffoli into Tyler Madden and Brock Faber, Muzzin into Bjornfot and Grundstrom, Martinez into Lias Andersson and a second round pick next season, and acquired Olli Maatta for literally nothing.

Blake inherited a roster from Lombardi that had pretty much no choice but to compete. That first season, they lost to a stacked Vegas roster with an injured team. The logical choice after a pretty successful season was to... rebuild? Okay, let’s say you knew the following season would be a complete failure. Can we at least respect Blake and Luc for recognizing it too and rebuilding? This fanbase is so jaded, it’s sometimes almost unbelievable. We’ve won two cups in the last decade and we currently have one of the deepest rebuilding prospect pools this century. That is pretty good.

Criticism is fine, but let’s give some credit where it’s due also. I agree that the Kovalchuk signing was bad. The Phaneuf trade wasn’t great, but the Gaborik contract was just as bad, so it’s kind of a wash. If anything, we should be praising the Phaneuf buyout. Are we going to cry about a mistake and then cry about fixing said mistake?

Anyway, no, Doughty isn’t one of the worst contracts in the league because he’s still one of the best players in the league. In a playoff series, there aren’t many players I’d take over him. And if COVID hadn’t changed the financial landscape of the NHL, Pietrangelo would be making as much as Doughty and Karlsson too.

 

[bouncesonly]

**************************

Post should be censored, too much logic for hfboards

 

[Raccoon Jesus]

You'll be shocked--SHOCKED--to learn that the author of this article is the one that has been consistently shitting on "Due" Doughty since Erik Karlsson started putting up points.

You'll also be "surprised" to know he doesn't have EK anywhere on his top-1o. Or Bobrovsky. Or myriad others. It's just his usual "crap on defensive defensemen" act to try to shoehorn WAR-related stats into the mainstream while shitting all over Drew.

 

[lumbergh]

The three partners he spent most (5vs5) time with over the past two seasons:
Derek Forbort
Joakim Ryan
Ben Hutton

That might help explain things.

 

[DoktorJeep]

How was the Toffoli deal a bad one considering the return he got for him? Same goes for the Pearson contract, which doesn't look so bad now. He performed so poorly it hurt his trade value, but I guess that's Blake's fault? What immediate value should he have gotten? You seem to have all the answers that you're hiding from us.

He also didn't sign Phaneuf, that was a swap of bad contracts with Ottawa. Kovalchuk was a short term plan that didn't work out and his cap hit is gone after this season. Blake actually managed to create a ton of cap flexibility over the years. I guess that's also an easy thing to do, right? Especially for a bad decision maker. What are the other cap hits you made up that are going to be with the team for three plus seasons?

Your post is evidence that you just hold a grudge against Blake for irrational reasons. You probably still boo him when you hear his name.

I judge people based on expectations and results. I understand when others look at context and nuance when making their own judgment and don’t discount their opinions. So I don’t disagree with any of the points you made, but the bottom line for me is Blake’s Kings teams have been disappointing at best and terrible for the majority of his time in charge.

There is zero evidence for Blake having any successful moves to acquire NHL level players. There are many misses in the list of decisions about players who aren’t entry level contracts. Blake came into the GM job saying the Kings are a team he expects to make the playoffs and go on a deep run. That turned out wrong.

I have no grudge against Blake. I didn’t care when he was brought back as a player and started to work for the team. I never booed him and clapped at his Jersey retirement night. I was already an adult when he was first traded, so I was over any illusions about the business side of sports. I was upset at the Kings for being cheapskates and operating like a bush league franchise with their MVP who was a top 5 defenseman in the league. The last player I remember holding a grudge against was Rick Tocchet because the Kings traded my favorite player for him.

My core concern about Blake is a lack in confidence in his skills at building a competitive team. His actions to date have shown poor vision and a tendency to make moves around the edges of problems. It was the same concern and frustration I had with Dave Taylor. So far, Blake’s path is not too different from DTs. They share a lot of the same issues.

 

[Anguyen92]

My main question about all of this is what could we, as a franchise, done better to maintain being a playoff team? I really want a good answer here and not walk around it. I don't think the cracks really start under Blake. It was already starting around 2015 with all the controversy that's happening with our team at the time and things didn't really get better from there.

At least now, our expectations are we are a crappy team, but we have a lot of great prospects. Hope those guys become stars and go from there. Things get easier when expectations are lowered at this point.

 

[Raccoon Jesus]

I judge people based on expectations and results. I understand when others look at context and nuance when making their own judgment and don’t discount their opinions. So I don’t disagree with any of the points you made, but the bottom line for me is Blake’s Kings teams have been disappointing at best and terrible for the majority of his time in charge.

There is zero evidence for Blake having any successful moves to acquire NHL level players. There are many misses in the list of decisions about players who aren’t entry level contracts. Blake came into the GM job saying the Kings are a team he expects to make the playoffs and go on a deep run. That turned out wrong.

I have no grudge against Blake. I didn’t care when he was brought back as a player and started to work for the team. I never booed him and clapped at his Jersey retirement night. I was already an adult when he was first traded, so I was over any illusions about the business side of sports. I was upset at the Kings for being cheapskates and operating like a bush league franchise with their MVP who was a top 5 defenseman in the league. The last player I remember holding a grudge against was Rick Tocchet because the Kings traded my favorite player for him.

My core concern about Blake is a lack in confidence in his skills at building a competitive team. His actions to date have shown poor vision and a tendency to make moves around the edges of problems. It was the same concern and frustration I had with Dave Taylor. So far, Blake’s path is not too different from DTs. They share a lot of the same issues.

This is all good discussion.

To me, simply, the biggest difference between Blake's first two years and Lombardi's first two years are the pubically-verbalized expectations. Relatedly, look what Blake inherited to clean up, too.

I think what happens next year matters most. They should look more like the 2010 Kings. And the end of the year was promising. It takes time to transition from GM to GM to put one's "stamp" on a team. Now, I think he's done that, with paring the roster veterans and building arguably the best pipeline in the league.

"He decided to pay Doughty, Pearson, Toffoli, Kovy and Dion big money, and got brutal results from them. " I think these have been mostly addressed but I agree with you in one sense--Blake's decisions to make the NHL team better have not borne results at a level we can say he can do that with confidence. He's shown he may be a good builder--we have yet to see for sure, pending development, but drafts look good. NHL roster moves? All busts. And it's your right to hold that against him until he proves otherwise, but the counterpoint is the positive trajectory of everyone (but Doughty, so far). I will say in his defense that one GOOD thing about those roster decisions is he's shown the agility to turn chicken shit into chicken soup quickly and he doesn't subscribe at all to sunk cost fallacy.

To tie it back to the thread, ANYONE would have given Doughty the same contract. We need more. I expect him to give it this year. And I expect Blake to be on it to get him the necessary support--I think it's fair to suggest we'll see Maatta and Bjornfot there this year which is undoubtely a huge step up from Joakim f***ing Ryan and maybe better chemistry than he had with Hutton.

 

[Jericho111091]

Doughty hasnt been good the last 2 seasons and has rightly earned a good deal of criticism, but what I find hilarious is that a lot of the people who say he has been among the worst defensemen in the league or he has the worst contract refuse to say the same for Karlsson because "he could bounce back and be elite again" or something