No matter the challenges of a salary-cap world — including even the hurdles the last few years presented — teams tend to identify their ‘core’ and pay those players accordingly.

A core can be defined a few ways. It can include a combination of the faces of a franchise, best players, highest-paid skaters, aging veterans and up-and-coming stars. While it varies, that generally makes up the centerpiece of a team, and the rest of the salary-cap structure is built around them.

Which teams have the most valuable core, and who gets the most bang for their buck? That’s what we’re going to try to find out, sorting all 32 teams into tiers along the way. The tiers represent where the team’s core stands right now, based on both caliber of players and some contract situations.

For consistency purposes, most cores feature five players (with a few being limited to four in the lower tiers). That’s how many a handful of recent champions had, including Colorado, Tampa Bay, Washington and Pittsburgh. That cutoff isn’t to short-change some players and highlight others. Some players and contracts won’t make the cut, while others have to be dunked on. It’s all a part of the process. The positions vary per squad — some teams don’t have a ‘core’ goalie like Andrei Vasilevskiy and manage just fine.

To measure player value, we’ll be using The Athletic’s Dom Luszczyszyn’s Game Score Value Added as our jumping-off point. And we’ll be projecting what a player should be worth based on that, with a cap hit percentage. Each visual, which can be expanded when clicked, will show a player’s actual cap hit percentage (CH%), projected cap hit percentage (pCH%) and the difference between the two (+/-). Any differential in the red represents a player who is performing below their current cap hit.

All of this is based on the current salary cap and a player’s current cap hit. Pending free agents are color-coded as well, with purple representing those who have already signed their next contracts for 2023.

So, let’s dive in from the top.

Win Now

A dozen teams make the cut for this tier. It’s not a perfect encapsulation of the playoff conversation but includes a number of contenders plus teams who have the core caliber to compete right now.

Few teams match up to the reigning champion Avalanche, whose five-player core is projected to be worth 18.4 wins. Right now, they take up about 43 percent of the cap space in Colorado, but should combine for almost 76 percent. That’s a surplus value of 32.2 percent of the salary cap. Nathan MacKinnon and Cale Makar are key parts of that, and so is Devon Toews — the player who would’ve been cut out of the picture had our cores been limited to just four. But he’s proven himself to be a true top-pair defenseman and an essential part of this team.

Colorado’s salary picture is about to change, though, with MacKinnon’s already-signed next contract. He’s still projected to be worth more than his impending cap hit percentage when his AAV doubles to $12.6 million. The team will drop to a surplus value of about 25 percent. How terrible!

The two teams who are pretty neck-and-neck with Colorado are Dallas and Boston. The Stars’ new-look core emerged over the last year or so, and they’ve quickly become one of the best, between their stellar top line, elite defenseman Miro Heiskanen and true No. 1 goalie Jake Oettinger. Like Colorado, they have rising costs incoming from new contracts to Roope Hintz and Joe Pavelski. But those are already signed and managed, so management knows they’ll maintain a very high surplus value, even with Hintz jumping up to an $8.45 million cap hit.

While the future is bright in Dallas, the present is in Boston. However, there are some long-term questions facing this squad. This team technically could have slid into the next tier, considering a lack of clarity in Patrice Bergeron’s (and David Krejci’s) future. But the stability on the blue line their top two provides, David Pastrnak’s outstanding play (even when considering what that’s about to cost Boston) and the team’s overall dominance keep them highly ranked. The Bruins had one of the most valuable cores last season, too, and they very well may be here again next year if they don’t have to hunt for a new 1C.

The next pair of teams have two things in common: increasing costs on the wing after the season, and strong prospect pools to extend their windows. Minnesota already knows what its top-six winger, Matt Boldy, will cost with his next contract — and that’s going to impact its surplus value since he’s obviously its most cost-efficient core player while on an entry-level deal. New Jersey, on the other hand, doesn’t know yet what Jesper Bratt’s next deal looks like and that’s going to shake up the cap picture.