Backes contract is just one of many obvious free agent blunders

The Bruins made a big thing this week out of how hard it was to have healthy-scratched David Backes.

And I bet it was. Backes is, by all accounts, a great guy in the room and a well-liked teammate and all that sort of thing. No coach wants to go up to a 34-year-old who’s played almost 900 games in the league and say, “We gotta sit you for this one so a kid from Providence can draw in.”

Then again, we all saw this coming, so Bruce Cassidy probably should have had a little more time to rehearse the speech. Since Backes signed with Boston for five years with a $6-million AAV, his production has dropped from 38 in 74 to 33 in 57 to, now, 12 in 38.

It is, or should be, a pretty well-known thing that guys who play Backes’s style of game break down quicker than other players, and when you’ve got 900 games of hard miles, plus 67 playoff games, plus time in the AHL, plus three years in college, it adds up fast. And that $6-million bet where you could have lived with maybe the last year or two being way below value ended up going sideways a year or two early instead.

The problem is that Backes is washed and Boston probably can’t do much about it. Full no-move this year (as with the last two), and limited no-trades the next two. That’s a lot of money to put in the press box or Providence if this trend continues. And the real problem for Don Sweeney is that he had to know this was a losing bet and was hoping the first three years would work out. So far, they mostly have; Boston’s really good, though Backes’s role with the team is more limited than the money would suggest.

Spending on the UFA market is by its nature inefficient, and almost any guy you sign is going to cost you more than he’s probably worth. Problematically for the Bruins, Backes’s contract is to some extent buyout-proof: it has $3 million in bonuses due in July, and another $1 million the year after. Maybe the Bruins eat that, and maybe they can offload him because his owed money is way lower than his cap hit.

But the point is, this was a contract that everyone knew on Day 1 was going to be worth buying out, even if the details made that somewhat infeasible. And that is, unfortunately, an all too common theme with contracts that eventually get bought out: Anyone with half a brain could have seen it coming.

Since 2013, when the league redid the CBA, there have been 82 buyouts in the NHL, including compliance buyouts. And just to eyeball it, and all but six or seven were contracts that you at least looked at sideways on the day they were signed, like, “Are they serious?” If you want to be a little more hard-and-fast with it, I’d say a little more than 4 in every 5 buyouts were deals I almost certainly panned on Day 1.

The average term on those 82 buyouts when the contract was signed was 3.5 years, with an average AAV of $3.67 million. Which is a hell of a thing. Again, you go into the UFA market looking to maximize the value of every dollar you spend but knowing that you’re probably going to end up plunking down more than a player is worth. Especially if it’s a UFA who’s closer to 29 or 30 than 27 or 28, you know you’re really trying to wring as many points per dollar as you can out of the guy in the first two years of that deal. Maybe three.

If that’s what you have to do to get the player you think your team needs to Take A Step, then so be it, as long as your owner is cool with you lighting several million dollars on fire at the back end of that deal. But often, these guys are your Ville Neinos, RJ Umbergers, and Dan Girardis (guys who were very bad values), instead of your Brad Richardses (guys who were at least pretty good values but signed until they were 62 years old).

The point is, if you know a contract is going to end up being a bad value, there are only a few instances in which the short-term needs outweighed the long-term problems.

But you get the feeling, just based on the sheer volume of these terrible deals, that GMs were not making that kind of decision.

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Ryan Lambert is a Yahoo! Sports hockey columnist. His email is here and his Twitter is here.

All stats via Corsica unless otherwise noted.