This week's Capped column is going to be a slightly different format. Down below will be a list on all of my model predictions for the projected cap hits of the 2020 free agent crop. In 2017, I started trying to model salaries, to some moderate level of success, but by 2018 it had grown so complicated, that it was more time consuming than it was worthwhile, in addition to being a lot about manual input, meaning my biases were still showing through. In 2019, I started the cap league rankings, and at that point, I knew I needed a more simplistic version of the salary prediction algorithm to be able to have the whole undertaking work. At the same time also determined that it wasn't a productive avenue of work to try and determine how long a contract will be, and there isn't a large benefit to knowing an approximate number of years ahead of time, so I have stopped trying to estimate it.

My rankings are for keeper leagues, and thus they take into account projected future cap hits for players with contracts expiring in the next three years. In order to be able to have this work for over 900 players that I am tracking, the manual input had to be completely cut out. As a result, I am still expanding on the new framework, but it has gotten to a point where the numbers seem viable enough to share with you readers.

A few weeks ago, I also went over a few contracts that I am curious to see the outcome on, mainly because there seems to be a lot of variance between the high and the low end of what we can expect. As a result of this variance, the projections for these players display some of the flaws in my current projection system, the main one being inability to properly deal with lengthy injury absences. This affects the projections shown for players such as Taylor Hall, Ilya Mikheyev, Erik Haula, Justin Schultz, and a few others. With that, the full disclaimer is that this list probably won't be perfect, and it's meant as a baseline of what someone's numbers show themselves to be worth when removing all of the biases we have towards player evaluation.

Also of note, the league minimum salary going into the 2020-2021 season will still be set at $700,000 (This is increasing to $750,000 for the 2021-2022 season). Almost half of the future free agents listed below show a league minimum salary projection, which generally means they have replacement level, or negative value for their team. Signing one of these players for more than a $1,000,000 cap hit would be a perceived overpayment by the team for a player who has many comparables on the market that could and will be signed for less.

All current salary info courtesy of capfriendly.

If you have questions, comments, or find an error in the sheet, let me know on Twitter @alexdmaclean, and if you're looking for some cap league trade deadline coverage, check out my articles from the last few weeks: Forwards, Defence, Goalies.

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Without further ado, the top 300 free agents for the summer of 2020, and their salary projections: