The Stanley Cup Doesn't Care Who Gets Paid the Most

Here's a question I've been thinking about: How often has the NHL's highest-paid player actually been on the team that won the Stanley Cup? You might think the answer would be fairly high. After all, the highest-paid players are supposed to be the best players. And the best players are supposed to give their teams the best chance to win.

Except that's not really how hockey works.

In the 2001 Stanley Cup, the Avalanche won, and Peter Forsberg was the NHL’s highest-paid player.

Peter Forsberg gives us one of the clearest examples. In 2000-01, Forsberg was tied for the NHL's highest reported salary at roughly $10 million with the Colorado Avalanche. And that spring, Colorado won the Stanley Cup. So it can happen. But it doesn't happen very often.

That's what makes this interesting to me. Once you get into the salary-cap era, the team with the biggest individual contract usually isn't the team holding the Cup at the end. There are plenty of great players who have been paid enormous amounts of money while their teams came up short.

And that tells us something about the difference between having the best player and building the best team.

The Stanley Cup Is a Team Award, Not a Big Contract Award.

This is where hockey gets a little funny. We spend an enormous amount of time talking about what a player is worth. Ten million dollars. Twelve million. Thirteen million. Maybe even more. We argue about whether a star is worth every penny.

But the Stanley Cup doesn't care. It doesn't care what the player makes. It doesn't care where he was drafted. It doesn't care how many goals he scored in October. Come playoff time, everybody has to fit together.

That's why some of the most expensive players in hockey have watched other teams win the Cup. Sidney Crosby has been one of the game's highest-paid stars. Alex Ovechkin has been there, too. Joe Sakic was famously paid an enormous amount after Colorado matched the Rangers' offer sheet in 1997. Great players. Huge contracts. But being the highest-paid player in the league doesn't automatically turn into a championship.

And maybe that's the lesson for today's NHL.

A team can spend a fortune on one superstar and still have holes everywhere else. Another team can spread its money around, find value in the middle of the lineup and suddenly have four lines that can play in April. That's why I keep coming back to the idea that the Stanley Cup isn't awarded to the team with the highest-paid player. It's awarded to the team that figures out how to make all its pieces work when the games matter most.

The paycheque tells us what a player is worth to somebody. The Cup tells us what a team is worth as a whole. Those aren't necessarily the same thing.