• Paper: Salary Determinants of NHL Defensemen: A Quantile Regression Approach
• Date: May 2012
• Authors: Gabriel Guentzel
• Institution: The Colorado College
• Program: Economics and Business

This thesis was authored in 2012 by Gabriel Guentzel who, interestingly enough, was a defenseman for Colorado College, a NCAA division I hockey team, before a seven-year pro career in the AHL, ECHL and in Italy, Sweden and Germany. He's also the brother of Pittsburgh Penguins' Jake Guentzel.

In his thesis, he looks at how defensemen’s salaries are affected by experience and the way they play with regards to offensive vs. defensive, physical vs. finesse. To do so, he uses a quantile regression approach that looks at 235 NHL defensemen that played at least 10 games in 2009-10 while using 2010-11 salaries. 17 independent variables are used in the model:

• Career points per game
• Career games played
• Career penalty minutes per game
• Career plus-minus per game
• Percentage of goals scored from all the shots taken
• The square of GAMES
• If the player was on the first or second All-Star teams
• If the player was selected in the first two rounds of the NHL entry draft
• If the player is left-hander
• Weight
• Height
• Team Revenue
• If the players played his junior career in the QMJHL
• If the players played his junior career in the WHL
• If the players played his junior career in the OHL
• If the players played his junior career in a US College
• If the players played his junior career in Europe

Although regular hockey fans would hope for some more easily digestible conclusions – but this is a University thesis, after all, not an article in The Hockey News -- some interesting key conclusions about defensemen salaries include:

• Number of games played and average point per games have a significant impact on salaries
• Height, being left-handed and percentage of goals per shot we also found to be significant
• Unsurprisingly, defensemen drafted in the first two rounds of the NHL draft can negotiate better salaries
• Where a player played junior hockey has an impact on the salary of low-paid defensemen
• Low-paid defensemen who shoot left-handed are paid more

Photo credit: Doug Kerr