Tyler Seguin. Jason Spezza. Patrick Sharp. Mattias Janmark.
That resembles a set of four that would definitely crack the top-six forward group on most rosters in the NHL. Well, that is just the short list of the talent that Jim Nill has gone out and snatched from opposing general managers through trades over the years. While he hasn’t made that big summer splash in the trade market for a forward (yet), he did add some through free agency this July by signing Martin Hanzal and Alexander Radulov.
Nill immediately made waves in the league when he traded for Tyler Seguin just months after being hired to take over in Dallas. Outside of last summer, he has acquired a big name every year he has been a Star.
I decided to take a look at how he stacks up among the rest of the general managers in the NHL in terms of acquiring forward talent through trades.
He’s simply one of the best.
Before We Begin…
I want to take a moment to at least briefly explain some of the statistics and how things were calculated in hopes to make the rest of this as clear as possible.
For starters, the statistic that will be referenced throughout the piece is known as GAR (Goals Above Replacement) and was created by @DTMAboutHeart. There is no way I can do it justice here so if you’re interested in learning everything that goes into it there is a series of five articles ending with this one here.
Essentially, it as an attempt to measure how many goals a player was worth throughout the season above a replacement-level player (someone that could easily be picked up for a league-minimum salary off of any AHL team).
As always, it must be said that no statistic is a perfect encapsulation of the value a player can bring. GAR, like any other statistic, has its flaws. With that being said, I believe this statistic is currently the best available at defining the value of an NHL player.
Is it going to give us a definitive ranking of players in the league? No. Is it going to be an incredibly good estimate? Absolutely.
As for how I used it and applied it to general managers, that is (hopefully) relatively simple to explain. No matter how a player was acquired (draft, free agency, trade), the general manager who made the acquisition was given “credit” for the GAR earned by that player for the length of that players’ time on that team.
If the player was traded, the general manager who traded him would receive “negative credit” for that player as long as they remained on the team they were traded to.
As an example, Peter Chiarelli receives credit for Tyler Seguin’s GAR amassed from the 2010-11 season to the 2012-13 season. He then started receiving negative credit for Seguin’s GAR in 2013-14 while Jim Nill was given the positive credit.
Now that this exhausting preamble is over with, let’s get into the data.
Acquiring Talent Through Trading
It’s well documented at this point what Nill has done in the trade market since arriving in Dallas. If you have a star-forward whose last name begins with the letter “S” and you see Nill’s name flash on the caller ID, don’t pick it up. You’re about to be fleeced.
The above visual shows a few things. On the left you can see Jim Nill’s Trade GAR acquired on a per-acquisition basis. The black numbers inside of the bars represent his rank among the 31 GM’s in the NHL. As you can see, he’s first in both overall Trade GAR/acquisition and Forward Trade GAR/acquisition.
In the middle, you see his total Trade GAR acquired and his rank of ninth. You may be thinking “9th? So what?”. Well, that rank represents total Trade GAR acquired starting in the 2008-09 season, five seasons before Nill took over as the general manager of Dallas.
The right side shows a three-season rolling average of Trade GAR/acquisition and also shows the Trade GAR/acquisition ranks in each season. He ranked 1st, 1st and 2nd in his first three seasons and still managed 10th this past year despite producers like Spezza, Sharp and Janmark missing for long stretches of the season.
How has he managed those high ranks? He has traded for three game-breakers during his first three summers on the job.
Let’s take a quick look at the 15 best seasons (in GAR) for players acquired through trade since the 2013-14 season.
Top-15 Trade GAR Seasons since 2013-14
| Player | Season | Team | Position | GAR | Traded By | Acquired By |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| TYLER.SEGUIN | 20132014 | DAL | F | 22.7 | Peter Chiarelli | Jim Nill |
| JOE.THORNTON | 20132014 | S.J | F | 20.42 | Mike O’Connell | Doug Wilson |
| JAKUB.VORACEK | 20142015 | PHI | F | 18.64 | Scott Howson | Paul Holmgren |
| TYLER.SEGUIN | 20142015 | DAL | F | 17.89 | Peter Chiarelli | Jim Nill |
| KEITH.YANDLE | 20142015 | ARI/NYR | D | 17.53 | Don Maloney | Glen Sather |
| JAKUB.VORACEK | 20132014 | PHI | F | 17.22 | Scott Howson | Paul Holmgren |
| JOE.THORNTON | 20142015 | S.J | F | 16.45 | Mike O’Connell | Doug Wilson |
| TYLER.SEGUIN | 20152016 | DAL | F | 16.42 | Peter Chiarelli | Jim Nill |
| JASON.POMINVILLE | 20142015 | MIN | F | 16.19 | Darcy Regier | Chuck Fletcher |
| PATRIC.HORNQVIST | 20152016 | PIT | F | 15.97 | David Poile | Jim Rutherford |
| BLAKE.WHEELER | 20162017 | WPG | F | 15.9 | Peter Chiarelli | Rick Dudley |
| JASON.POMINVILLE | 20132014 | MIN | F | 15.78 | Darcy Regier | Chuck Fletcher |
| RYAN.O’REILLY | 20162017 | BUF | F | 15.3 | Joe Sakic | Tim Murray |
| PATRICK.SHARP | 20132014 | CHI | F | 15.15 | Bob Clarke | Dale Tallon |
| JASON.SPEZZA | 20142015 | DAL | F | 15.11 | Bryan Murray | Jim Nill |
Quick side note: Chiarelli, ouch.
Three of the best 15 GAR seasons for a player acquired through trade belong to Tyler Seguin with a fourth going to Jason Spezza. That’s over 26.5% of the top-15 going to players acquired by Jim Nill.
As I briefly mentioned earlier, Nill ranks ninth in the league in terms of his total Trade GAR acquired since the 2008-09 season. Below is a quick look at a running total of Trade GAR (forwards only) acquired since Nill started in Dallas.
Nill ranks third in forward Trade GAR and uses less seasons than most to do it. He has eight fewer acquisition seasons than Chuck Fletcher and seven fewer than the top-GM in this category in Jim Rutherford.
The players he gave up to get those forwards accumulated just 35.37 GAR for the GM’s who traded for the them, good for a differential of over 70 total GAR.
What’s His Next Move?
For the time being, the Stars look like they are done making moves ahead of the 2017-18 season. With the signings of Hanzal and Radulov (talented forwards, go figure), the Stars are snug against the salary cap.
Next offseason will be one to watch for Nill and the Stars. According to capfriendly.com, Dallas will have at least $18.5M in cap space and won’t have any big-money players to sign (outside of maybe Antoine Roussel, who likely won’t command a ton of cap). That’s plenty of space to play around with and Nill could strike again for yet another talented forward.
While he certainly isn’t a perfect general manager (mistakes with the defensive side of the game highlight that), he has been pretty close to perfect when trading for high-end talent at the forward position. He hasn’t whiffed much at all and also has managed to not give a whole lot up in his trades.
If I’m a general manager looking to trade for a top-line forward, I’m looking to use to Nill model.