The skaters

As with this ranking's 2007 iteration, there is no shortage of stats from which to choose. However, the rankings have been arrived at by a combination of stats and common sense; sometimes the best value player is the cheapest, and sometimes not. Sometimes the best value player is the one with the best performance stats — and sometimes not. In all cases, the evaluation should be easy to understand and provide no shortage of water cooler conversation.

Forwards

Since a forward is paid to score points, we've taken salary and divided it by seasonal point total to arrive at a dollar-per-point total. It's that simple. The player with the lowest dollar figure in our estimation offers the best value; the player with the highest, the least. Only those players who have played more than 50 games of the 82-game season made the cut.

Defencemen

The defenceman's job is to prevent goals from being scored. For this reason, best and worst value picks were chosen by first isolating for best/worst +/-. Then the players were compared by salary. Our best value picks have the best combination of lowest cost-per-minute on the ice (annual salary divided by total minutes played) and the highest plus/minus number. Our worst value picks are just the opposite. Only defenders who played 50 or more games of the 82-game season are included.

Goalies

The most valuable goalie is the one whose cost per goal allowed is the lowest ($/save - $/shot allowed). But to correct for this resulting in the lowest paid goalie automatically being the best value, we also took GAA into account. To be considered, goalies had to have played at least 35 games of the 82-game season.

The teams

We took each team's total combined compensation (salaries and rookie bonuses) and divided it by the number of points the team achieved in the regular season. The team with the lowest cost per point spent the most wisely.

Player and team financial stats

Compensation is in U.S. dollars and is sourced from the NHL Players' Association plus applicable portions of the rookie bonus in NHLnumbers.com. The total rookie bonus is divided by the number of years that the player is committed to the current team before he becomes a free agent or restricted free agent. Incentive bonuses and other compensation agreements beyond salary and rookie bonuses are not included. Data current to April 6, 2008.

To determine the cost of total minutes spent in the penalty box (PIM $), we first divided the player's annual salary by total game minutes (games played times 60 minutes). We then multiplied the result by the player's total penalty minutes over the season.