Should the Red Wings re-sign Nyquist?

What seemed like a simple question before the season started, has now grown into a much more complex and thought-provoking one throughout the early stages of this season.

Of course, the most important thing to do for a rebuilding team is to sell off their high-value unrestricted free agents before the trade deadline. Likely to some playoff team that thinks the extra contribution will help them win a series.

But when that pending free agent is playing the way Gustav Nyquist is currently playing, more questions have to be asked.

After all, the end game of going through a rebuild is to have players that will positively impact your team and have you win more games. Doesn’t Nyquist do that?

As of right now, Nyquist is one of the best – if not the best – players on the Red Wings this season. He is second in points to Larkin, with only two goals and a total of thirteen assists, but brutal 4.2 shooting percentage tells us that more goals should be coming for the winger.

His career shooting percentage is lower than the average NHL forward, but he has never dipped below 7.3% in a season that he has played more than 25 games. If he was shooting at his career shooting percentage of 11.1, he would have ~5.3 goals, so let’s say 5, this season.

For a much more detailed and in-depth approach to how Nyquist is performing this season, I turn to the evolving-hockey goals above replacement metric. It breaks down a player’s contribution to the team by various components and overall who is really performing above a replacement level player.

It’s far too complicated for me to understand the details, but I trust the importance of the metric and the work that Evolving-Hockey does.

Seen here, Nyquist is by far the most impactful player for the Wings this season. With a 5.3 GAR at even-strength, Nyquist is sixth among all NHL forwards and in some pretty well-rounded company. McDavid, Point, Marner, Stone, and Skinner, are some names that are around the same level as Nyquist at even-strength.

Not only is Nyquist performing well this year, but he has been in the Wings’ top-4 of GAR for the past four years. Meaning that no matter what his point totals were for those years, he has been there and performing well. Since acquiring points can be luck anyways, sometimes they can skew the opinion of a player. With GAR, I find that it wraps every little detail of a player’s overall game, into a couple simple numbers.

It’s of course not the only thing one should look at, but I find it is a good indicator of what a player’s on-ice performance is. We can all agree that Abdelkader has been the worst player according to our eyes, and GAR reflects that.

According to this, Nyquist has been playing exceptionally well during his NHL career, but there are many other factors to consider when the possibility of re-signing a pending UFA comes up.

The biggest thing will be his age. Nyquist will be turning 30-years-old before his next contract kicks in. We can all agree, statistically, that players heavily regress as they age – it’s just science.

So maybe re-signing Nyquist to a long-term deal is not the smartest option, but if they were able to come to an agreement that saw Nyquist staying here for the next few years – say three or four – that might be a completely different story.

Players do not typically sign away their UFA eligibility to a short-term deal, but we just saw a similar player in a similar situation do exactly that. Max Pacioretty was acquired by the Vegas Golden Knights and then signed a four-year extension that will see him be there until he is 34-years-old. Not the usual 6-8 year extension you usually see when it comes to a player’s UFA years.

Could Nyquist see the Wings rising up and wanting to be a part of the beginnings of playoff contention in a few years? No one knows, but it is certainly a possibility.

The Wings will certainly have the space though – Jimmy Howard, Niklas Kronwall, Nick Jensen, Luke Witkowski, and Thomas Vanek, are all going to be UFAs at the end of the season. With a projected cap hit of over $14-million (without using LTIR space), the Wings will be able to make some moves for next season.

Regardless of all of these possibilities and how well Nyquist is playing this season, it is important to remember the goal of a rebuild – acquire picks and young prospects for the future.

Depending on the package that Nyquist could fetch at the trade deadline on February 25th, the Wings can look pretty well off after that date passes. If some teams pay close attention to Nyquist’s game, they will be adding a player that can play on your first or second line and instantly make them better at both ends of the ice.

If a deal is too good to pass up, simply take it and run, but there might be some heavy lifting to do afterward.

Could the Wings front office convince a completely free UFA Nyquist to come back to Detroit, waving the possibility of playing with Zadina, Larkin, Mantha, and Cholowski, for the next few years? Maybe not, but it is certainly worth a try if they traded him away for a solid package of future assets.

At the end of the day, the purpose of a rebuild is to get as many young players together to sustain future success. But on the ice, Nyquist is probably a better player heading into his thirties, than a forward that might make the NHL in a couple years.

It’s all about asset management and I think that fans should not be so quick to assume that trading away Nyquist is the correct decision.