In today’s NHL, players aren’t just judged on their ability; they’re graded on value and efficiency — how large is their impact relative to their contract? Let’s look at players who didn’t live up to their contracts in 2025-26 and how much longer those deals will be on the books.Here’s how we’ll conduct this exercise.• We’ll be using Dom Luszczyszyn’s player model as a measuring stick. Net Rating provides an all-in-one performance metric that weighs factors such as point production, play-driving, defensive impact, penalties drawn, blocked shots, faceoffs, penalty-kill impact and more. That impact is then translated to a market value — what that player’s contributions should be worth — and that market value is compared to their actual cap hit.• This is solely measuring regular-season impact; no playoff numbers are included.• A player isn’t “bad” if he ends up on one of the inefficient lists. It just means he wasn’t quite worth his cap hit in 2025-26, at least from a statistical perspective. There are plenty of high-end NHLers who you’ll see throughout the piece, many of whom actually played very well this season.• We’ll only be identifying players who underperformed their cap hit by more than $1 million.• No goalies will be analyzed.• There are blind spots in the model, like any statistical measure — it’s not perfect. With that in mind, I used the model to generate an initial list of players for each team, but I occasionally exercised personal discretion to remove a player from the “inefficient” contracts pile or tweak the order if I felt there was an obvious flaw or blind spot in the model’s evaluation.• Players who missed the overwhelming majority of the season weren’t included.• Players who changed teams midseason weren’t included either.These Canes were built differentShayna Goldman and Max BultmanAnaheim Ducks