Contract Year Phenomenon in the NHL addresses the issue of employee incentives by examining the performance of professional hockey players. The statistical book-keeping in hockey offers a unique opportunity for examining employee performance, something most business settings lack. By first examining how NHL general managers unevenly weight performance in the final year of a player"s contract we create motive for shirking. We then individually regress each statistical category on itself, with a dummy variable for contract year, to determine if player performance is statistically different in the final year of a contract. Our findings challenge the current method in which general managers quantify the value of players. With these results a general manager would have the information to eliminate inefficiencies in the current method giving them an information advantage when evaluating free agents. They also suggest that a different contract structure would be more effective in maximizing...