Frugality in the NHL salary cap? Not a chance. Here are some of the NHL's highest paid players.

Alexander Ovechkin is the league's highest paid player, coming in at a salary cap hit of $9,538,000 for this season. He's just ahead of both Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin, who are both being paid $8,700,000 for the season, rounding out the league's three most expensive players. They're arguably the three best forwards in the NHL since the lockout, so it is fairly rational that they are the league's highest paid players. Rationality isn't factored in for a few of the other highest paid players in the league, though.

Eric Staal makes $8,250,000. He's a great player, but being paid $450,000 less than Crosby? I don't know about that. Rick Nash makes $7,800,000 and Vincent Lecavalier makes $7,727,272. I bet Tampa would love to have that Lecavalier contract back, since he's never been the same since coming back from surgery a few seasons ago. Nash is similar to Staal, but without the 100-point season and Stanley Cup ring. He's a great player, but hasn't been the consistent leader that the Blue Jackets have needed to even make it to the post-season on a regular basis, let alone compete for the Cup.

It's interesting to look at the salary expenses of the most successful teams during the past couple of years. Boston won the Cup in 2011 and their highest-paid player this year is Zdeno Chára at roughly $6,917,000. He's 18th overall in salaries in the league. Near-miss Vancouver's highest paid players are each of the Sedin twins at $6,100,000 per twin. They rank 41st and 42nd among the league's highest-paid players — pretty low on the list. Vancouver's cap hit, though, is over $65,000,000 — third highest in the league — which seems to mean that the money they spend is balanced well throughout the team. Boston, on the other hand, is only 14th in terms of their cap hit at just over $61,000,000.

This should make it obvious about what most hockey fans already know, which is that you don't need to spend a ton of money to have a successful team. Detroit, probably the consistently best team in the league over the last two decades, is only 19th on the list of the highest salaries with a cap hit of just over $59,000,000. Division rivals Columbus, on the other hand, are seventh, with a cap hit of just over $64,000,000.

There's the old adage that you need to spend money to make money. I don't know if that's true in the modern NHL. There seems to be little correlation between the money a team spends on players each season and their success in the post-season, if any. Despite that truth, frugality has never been at the forefront of the minds of many NHL general managers, even in the salary cap world — a world that was created largely to protect these managers from themselves. If you want to know more about who is getting paid too much (or too little), check out nhlnumbers.com