Sidney Crosby is one of the five highest-paid players in the Pittsburgh Penguins roster. (Reuters)

By Jonathan Bombulie/The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review (TNS)

For more than three decades, the Penguins have been a star-driven team.
That creates certain challenges in a salary-cap environment, as Dan Mason, a professor at the University of Alberta who teaches a class in the business of hockey, understands.
“They’re going to have to remunerate those players in a way that’s going to make it difficult for them to retain other players,” Mason said.
Translating academia into English, that means star players make big wads of cash, leaving less for everyone else.
The Penguins’ five highest-paid players — Evgeni Malkin, Sidney Crosby, Phil Kessel, Kris Letang and Marc-Andre Fleury — will make $38 million next season. That will fill 53.2 percent of the $71.4 million salary cap.
Add in the other 17 or 18 players on the 23-man roster — even after the Penguins shed third-line center Brandon Sutter and his $3.3 million salary in a trade with Vancouver on Tuesday — and the team is bumping its head on the salary ceiling.
The only teams that will allocate more than half of their cap space to their top five players are the Penguins and Chicago Blackhawks, who are fresh off a Stanley Cup with star forwards Patrick Kane and Jonathan Toews making eight figures.
On the surface, that might sound like the Penguins and Blackhawks are in an untenable position. A closer look tells a different tale.
First, top-heavy salary structures are common in the NHL. Sixteen of the league’s 30 teams allocate between 40 and 48 percent of their cap space to five top players.
Second, it’s probably better to max out the salary cap on stars than not have any. The Toronto Maple Leafs, for example, who finished last season 30-44-8 and have missed the playoffs nine of the past 10 seasons, pay their top five players 36.4 percent of the available cap space. Their highest-paid forwards are Nathan Horton and Joffrey Lupul.
“It’s like in the NFL,” said Tom Lynn, an NHL player agent who used to be an assistant general manager with the Minnesota Wild. “The big quarterback contract always seems bad until you don’t have (a star quarterback).”
The Penguins seem to have accepted their fate as a top-heavy team, failing to show any inclination to jettison one of their five highest-paid stars.
“You can have one philosophy or another on it, but I feel that sometimes your philosophy is adjusted to the players that you have,” assistant general manager Jason Botterill said. “This is the situation we have here. We’re very excited about the players we have. It’s our job to make it work.”
How to make it work is the $71.4 million question.

GETTING MORE FOR LESS
The easiest solution to a top-heavy salary problem is to get regular contributions from young players who are still on six-figure entry-level contracts.
Gibsonia’s Brandon Saad scored 23 goals for Chicago last season while making $832,500. The average veteran 23-goal scorer in the NHL last season made $5 million.
The Penguins don’t have a star forward like Saad waiting in the wings, but they do have a handful of relatively inexpensive players who could fill important roles.
“We’re allowed to allocate more money to our forwards right now because we have young players like (Olli) Maatta, (Derrick) Pouliot and (Brian) Dumoulin probably in our lineup on defense next year,” Botterill said. “You’re hopeful a (Scott) Wilson or a (Bryan) Rust or (an Oskar) Sundqvist can contribute on a regular basis and hopefully allow us to go after more free agents in the future and allocate more money there.”
Another solution is to find players via trades or free agency who might outperform their salaries — the next Pascal Dupuis, in other words.
Dupuis, who essentially was a throw-in in the Marian Hossa deal with the Atlanta Thrashers in 2008, averaged 23 goals per season while making $1.5 million per year from 2011-13.
“These teams have to become much more creative to identify players that could be a top-two line player that they can pay less than the average top-two line player, but they hope that they jell with the star players they’re paying a lot of money to,” Mason said.
Advanced analytics could be the key to finding the next Dupuis.
Mason said he has a friend who works in analytics with a soccer team in the English Premier League. The team paid big money to add two defenders but found they weren’t playing well together.
After an intense, data-driven survey of the defenders’ play, the team determined the younger of the two was deferring to his veteran teammate. A quick conversation with the coaching staff fixed the problem.
If an NHL team could use similarly clever analytical efforts to identify the perfect complementary linemate at bargain prices, it would be ahead of the game.

POTENTIAL PITFALLS
Even if a top-heavy team drafts useful young players and finds undervalued performers through trades and free agency, it still can run into problems.
The first potential pitfall is one the Penguins are well acquainted with: injuries.
A team can allocate 15 percent of its salary cap to a star player if he regularly contributes to wins. An injured player making 15 percent of the team’s payroll to sit in the press box is a potential disaster.
Being able to predict a player’s health before offering him a long-term, lucrative contract might end up being the holy grail of analytics in any professional sport.
“That’s very big in baseball,” Lynn said. “Their analytics look harder at injury history and games missed. I think hockey might have to start doing that.”
When he worked with the Wild about a decade ago, Lynn conducted a detailed study of the best way for an team to allocate its resources.
He found there’s no problem paying big bucks to a game-changing center like Crosby or Malkin or a minutes-munching defenseman such as Letang.
“If you have a centre who plays deep in the defensive zone, who will be involved in every faceoff when he’s on the ice, who kills penalties, who will be involved in the offensive zone, then it starts to look better,” Lynn said. “He’s going to be involved in a good majority of your important plays. A top center like Toews is going to be on the ice for maybe 35 percent of your important events during a game.
“A defenseman like a (Ryan) Suter or a Duncan Keith who will play 24-plus minutes a game — that’s 40 percent of your ice time, 40 percent of the hardest minutes, often — it starts to look better.”
Paying top dollar for a scorer such as Kessel? Lynn wasn’t convinced.
“If you’re paying a one-dimensional offensive winger, like a Pavel Bure, $10 million to score 40 or 50 goals, it’s not worth it,” he said. “A replacement player at $3 million could probably score 25 or 28. You could get through it.
“It’s a stretch to devote that much of your money to him. He’s got to be a really good defensive winger or bring power, physicality, something else. As great as it is to have a guy who goes up and down his wing and scores 42 goals like Peter Bondra used to, if you’ve dedicated 18 percent of your payroll to him, that’s tough.”