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Do National Hockey League Players Perform Better During Their Contract Years?
Liehman, Jan ; Opatrný, Matěj (advisor) ; Janhuba, Radek (referee)
This thesis analyses the validity of the contract year phenomenon in the Na- tional Hockey League (NHL). This notion, that players increase their perfor- mance in the final year of their contract, has been supported by previous find- ings in baseball and basketball, but ice hockey has been largely overlooked thus far. This thesis further extends the analysis to the second-to-last year on players' contract and distinguishes between unrestricted and restricted free agents. Rigorous analysis of the NHL contract structure is employed to elimi- nate contract states that would bias the results. By using a within-player fixed effects model in combination with advanced performance metrics, it arrives at an unexpected conclusion that upcoming unrestricted free agents improve their performance in the second-to-last year of their contract, but there is not enough evidence to suggest that they improve in the final one. No performance increase was found for upcoming restricted free agents during the final two years of their contract. JEL Classification C23, D01, J30, J41, Z20 Keywords contract year phenomenon, NHL, incentives, motivation Title Do National Hockey League Players Perform Better During Their Contract Years? Author's e-mail jan.liehman@gmail.com Supervisor's e-mail matej.opatrny@fsv.cuni.cz
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