July 1 was always supposed to be dumbest day on the NHL's calendar. It didn't deliver this year. The longest and largest deal overall: six years and $33.5 million, Andrej Sekera with the Oilers. The largest cap hit: $6 million, Mike Green with the Red Wings. For forwards, Matt Beleskey (Bruins) and Michael Frolik (Flames) signed for the most years, with five. Frolik also had the largest cap hit ($4.3 million) and most money committed ($21.5 million). MORE: | | All the guys in that paragraph are good players, too. : Matt Niskanen signed for seven years with the Capitals. Five other players signed for five. Seven more signed for four. Paul Stastny (Blues) pulled in a $7 million hit on his own. Thomas Vanek (Wild) netted $6.5 million. Dave Bolland (Panthers, and !!!) got five years and $25.5 million from Florida. On and on. "Sometimes, this day, you make some of the poorest decisions you can make," Flyers GM Ron Hextall said last year. So . . .what happened? What led to such relative austerity? Here are a few things to consider. Weaker crop of players All due respect to Beleskey and Sekera they'regood players, but they're not first-tier in quality or name recognition. Take last season: Stastny was sold as a first-line center during a Western Conference arms race at the position. Niskanen was coming off a huge offensive season. Vanek still had that pure-goal-scorer luster. Beleskey can play anywhere along a top nine, and Sekera is a steady, play-driving defenseman who best fits on a second pair. More analytics Not everyone can get smart at once, but plenty of teams did their part over the last year. Look at the Maple Leafs as a team could have, , Kyle Dubas and Mark Hunter went, at least in terms of the players they brought in, cheap and analytically favorable. A P.A. Parenteau here. A Matt Hunwick there. Hey, it's Mark Arcobello! Look, Daniel Winnik.All are potentially valuable pieces. None signed for more than two years or $2.25 million, both of which went to Winnik. There's more value on undervalued a sets, developing your draft picks and using your money to retain them. Toronto was an ATM for a generation; now, it has nearly $15 million in space, per . It's done spending money just to spend it. "Obviously we've also created a lot of cap space for us to give us some flexibility going forward," Shanahan said. "Some of the players we've picked up are young guys obviously just starting their careers and it's our job to help them develop, it's our job to turn the picks into prospects and Quinn Ewers Jersey it's our job to turn those prospects into productive Leafs." It's not just the Leafs, either. Most teams have employees dedicated to finding economic advantagesnow, and didn't before. It's that simple; it's not just the Kings and Blackhawks. It's the Panthers and the Devils and the Oilers and the Hurricanes and, yes, the Leafs, and a whole bunch of other teams. One of the basic tenets of an analytical decision-making proce s, as it relates to sports, is sniffing out undervalued resources and avoiding potentially disastrous bidding wars on the open market. Develop your players to fill your roster, set your valuations on the guys you need to fill the gaps, make the offer, then step away from the telephones. Negotiating window If you arm front offices with smarter people, better data and more time to avoid mistakes, things are going to change. For the third straight year, general managers were able to spend a couple days talking to UFAs ahead of July 1, and it continued to result in le s gigantic overspends. It's sort of like that old bit of advice: If you write an angry letter (or email, or whatever) to somebody, put it in a drawer for a day before you send it. It could stop you from saying something stupid out of anger. Substitute "saying something stupid out of anger" with "financially crippling your hockey club." The state of the cap Last season, the league went from a $64.3 million upper limit to to$69 million. This season, largely because of the drop of the Canadian dollar, it went from $69.0million to $71.4 million. That's $2.3 million more, potentially, to spend than last summer. Factor in bigger-market teams spending their money wisely (again, we're glancing toward Ontario). Teams like Chicago, Boston, the Rangers, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, cap teams all, had work to do just to add anyone. The death of back-diving deals We still need to get used to salaries that aren't artificially driven down by fugazi years at the contract's end. No player as good as Marian Ho sa is ever going to sign for $5.275 million. No team is ever going to haul in players as dually desired as Zach Parise and Ryan Suter, as Minnesota did in 2012. It takes time for everyone to alter their mindsets with stuff like this; look at the outcry that happens whenever a defenseman signs for$5 million a year. That's a second-pairing guy now. Under a $55 million cap, that wasn't so. Big-ticket items off the board DefensemanDougie Hamilton (RFA, traded from Boston to Calgary and ) and goalie Devan Dubnyk (six years, $26 million with Minnesota)were gone. So was Carl Soderberg, who signed a five-year, $23.75 million contract with the Avalanche after Boston traded his negotiation rights. All three of those contracts, had they come on the open market, would've been the biggest at their positions. Soderberg , who's working on an extension with the Blue Jackets after they pulled him away from Chicago. Some of these mitigating factors are here to stay; the game won't get dumber, and back-diving deals aren't coming back.Others will be back in play the big teams are going to have space; somedaythe cap will rise more quickly; the crop of available won't get weaker. For one day, though, everything came together, and no teams got hurt. David Gbenda Jersey