The Flyers have played four hockey games this season. In these games, offseason pickup Jody Shelley has played 17:06 of total ice time. 17 divided by 4, carry the six… that comes out to an average time on ice of 4:16 per game thus far.
The biggest crticism of Shelley’s signing this summer was his paycheck. He’ll earn $1.2 million this season. Okay, so the Flyers are rolling in cash… no big deal. He costs $1.1 million against the cap, though, over each of the next three seasons, and therein lies the problem.
It comes down to simply this: the Flyers are using $1.1 million of their allotted $59.4 million on a guy who sits on his ass for an average of 55:44 seconds each night. While some would argue that his sitting on the bench for that amount of time is a worth while investment in itself because of the intimidation factor he brings to the game, the fact of the matter is he gets paid to play hockey — something he’s doing very little of these days.
Shelley’s case made me curious. I wanted to see exactly how much the Flyers are paying him per second that he’s actually working — on the ice, in the game. (Not to say he’s not working during practice and stuff, but you get the idea.) It’s pretty simple math, if I’m doing it correctly.
Granted, I write because I suck at math, but this should be simple enough… and I own about six calculators.
An average TOI/G of 4:16 equals 256 seconds per game. If you extrapolate that over an 82 game season, Shelley will play about 20,992 seconds of hockey this season. If you divide his $1.2 million salary by the number of seconds he’s on pace to play this season, you learn that Jody Shelley makes about $57.16 each second he’s on the ice.
After the jump, we have a chart featuring the rest of the team. Keep in mind that the ice time averages aren’t perfect at this point because we’re only four games into the new season, but these calculations should give a pretty decent ballpark of an idea.
Oh, and it’s Friday — PAY DAY! — so when you take your check to the bank tonight, this will remind you just how much more money all of these guys have over you.
The table is sorted in descending order based on who makes the most money per second.
