Chris Higgins has been on an NHL roster every season since 2004. At 33, his days as a 20-goal guy are long gone, but he’s a veteran player and a solid defensive forward who can pitch in with a bottom six role, having played the last six seasons with the Vancouver Canucks.

He didn’t sign anywhere as a free agent during the summer, and ended up in Calgary Flames camp on a professional tryout contract under former Canucks assistant Glen Gulutzan. “I have to perform, but I feel like I could play a role here and help this team be very successful,” Higgins said. “Training camp is tryouts. I’ve approached it, with or without a contract, the same way every year.”

He left camp without a contract. So did Tuomo Ruutu, 33, who had been on a PTO with the Vancouver Canucks. So did defenseman Mike Weber, 28, on a PTO with the St. Louis Blues. So did a few dozen other veterans who entered training camps after the phones didn’t ring during the summer, hoping to latch on and then seeing the jobs they competed for turned over to other players.

Frequently, younger ones.

There’s been a material change in the way NHL teams are building out their rosters. You have veteran stars and standouts. You have younger players that are in the midst of their servitude under restricted free agent rules (as brutally chronicled by Dave Lozo here). And then you have this forgotten middle class of NHL players: Role players, eligible for unrestricted free agency, around or over age 30, making between $1 million to around $3 million against the salary cap.

Like Higgins, who made $2.5 million with the Canucks. Or Ruutu, who made $4.75 million with the Devils. This isn’t the same situation as, say, the Toronto Maple Leafs sending Brooks Laich, 33, and his $4.5 million cap hit down to the Marlies with term on his contract. This is more like free-agnet Brandon Prust, 32, being released from a Leafs PTO after having made $2.5 million against the cap with Montreal and Vancouver in his last contract.

It’s a trend born of two catalysts: The salary cap and science.

The salary cap obviously demands fiscal responsibility and sanity. (Well, unless you’re Ken Holland.) In order to pay the top players, in order to pay the young stars, in order to have some breathing room for unforeseen events and at the trade deadline, general managers can’t commit $2.5 million to a role player any longer.

The Pittsburgh Penguins are capped out. They have nine forwards making more than $1 million, and that includes the $1 million they tossed to Matt Cullen last summer – the kind of player that would have been squeezed out were it not for the goodwill he earned in the Cup run. After that it’s Conor Sheary, Tom Kuhnhackl, Bryan Rust and Scott Wilson on rookie contracts and Tom Sestito working for the league minimum ($575,000).

This is reality in a capped league. Not only in how a team manages in the moment, but how it manages for future seasons.

“It only takes one or two off-seasons where you have to let go of guys you wanted because of money to realize that you need to think carefully about paying big money to guys in their 30’s,” said one member of an NHL front office. “And I think the 23-year-olds tend to be better than the 33-year-olds that they’re replacing.”

Which brings us to science.

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It’s widely believed that the points-per-minute peak for NHL forwards is actually around age 24, and that the drop in effectiveness once a player enters his 30s is rather steep. Sure, there are outliers like Jaromir Jagr, but this will all be explained one day when a brave soul yanks on his mullet, opens his skull plating and we gawk at all the robot parts of this obvious android.

“I think it’s understood across the board that after 28 [years old], science shows a dramatic decrease in a player’s performance, specifically the guys who aren’t skilled,” one former NHL forward told us. “If a team thinks a young guy can do the same job as an older veteran player, they go young every time and that’s the opposite of how it was even 5-10 years ago. The mid range second or third-line, 40-point veteran player has been phased out in the NHL.”

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