With free agency just a few days away, the buzz is about how teams won't be splurging on goaltending, and instead focusing on other areas of their organization. Is that really the way to build a Stanley Cup contender? I've taken a look at the conference finalists from the past three seasons and examined how their budgets were distributed. After looking at that, there seems to be some consistency to that logic. All numbers courtesy of NHL Numbers.

Here is a comparison of this season's final four. The first column is the actual dollar amount spent by the team and the second is the percentage of their team budget. Stanley Cup winners are highlighted in bold.

The average budget allocation for the season was as follows:

Forward average: 57.6%, defense average: 32.7%, goaltending average: 9.7%

The numbers here are a bit misleading. Chicago's 10.7% is mostly allocated to Cristobal Huet, who hardly saw a lick of ice time during the playoffs. If you replaced him with a generic $1 million starter, the value would be closer to the 5% seen in Philadelphia and Montreal. On the blueline, Chicago had the perfect storm despite Brian Campbell's contract with Duncan Keith on the books for cheap while Kim Johnsson hardly played due to injury. Philadelphia's defensive spending was well over the average, mostly because of the duo of Chris Pronger and Kimmo Timonen taking up a big chunk of cap space. Montreal had a similar setup with Andrei Markov (who missed a good chunk of the playoffs) and Roman Hamrlik. San Jose only splurged on one elite defenseman

Now let's look at the 2008-09 final four:

The average budget allocation for the season was as follows:

Forward average: 56.6%, defense average: 33.8%, goaltending average: 9.6%

Chicago obviously sticks out here for their two-headed monster of Cristobal Huet and Nikolai Khabibulin; their blueline was essentially the same distribution as the 2009-10 season but their forward group was paid a lot less -- that's due to the free agents like Marian Hossa that were brought in. Detroit invested 41% in defense, and that mostly went into their top four of Nicklas Lidstrom, Brian Rafalski, Brad Stuart, and Niklas Kronwall. Carolina played defense by committee with no standouts; instead, the most expensive guy on their blueline was Joni Pitkanen. In net, Cam Ward played with a cap-friendly $2.67 million hit and he shared the nets with -- wait for it -- Michael Leighton. As for the Pittsburgh Penguins, they lucked out as Evgeni Malkin didn't his his big pay raise yet.

And finally, let's visit the final four from 2007-08:

The average budget allocation for the season was as follows:

Once again, Pittsburgh lucks out, as Malkin and Sidney Crosby were still on their rookie contracts. In fact, the whole team was on a budget because of its youth, with Brooks Orpik and Marc-Andre Fleury heading into new contracts following the 07-08 season. Philadelphia's revolving door of starters landed with Martin Biron in this particular season, he of the $3.5 million cap hit. For the Red Wings, recall that they used Dominik Hasek and Chris Osgood as a tandem in net that season, and Henrik Zetterberg had yet to receive his pay raise, though the blueline was still built around Lidstrom and Rafalski. Dallas actually had a somewhat similar defensive structure that year except their duo of Mattias Norstrom and Sergei Zubov earned a cut less than Detroit's. In net, a big percentage of their budget went toward Marty Turco.

What can we learn from this? A good chunk of success is "right place at the right time" happy accidents, when guys who are on the last year or two of contracts emerge as a group. Those teams are usually forced to break up, with core assets remaining while support players go on to big paychecks later on. And if you count out Chicago's distorted goalie allocation, almost all of these teams didn't go with expensive goalies. Marc-Andre Fleury and Cam Ward cashed in on their second contracts but they weren't making "star" money a la Roberto Luongo. In fact, of these teams, the highest paid goalies were Evgeni Nabokov and Marty Turco -- who are, coincidentally, the two "name" free agent goalies out there.

If you look at the players coming out of each of these teams due for big pay raises (either already committed via extension or through impending free agency), there are significant dollars going around. When they say the NHL is now a young man's game, that's the truth -- youth serves when it's reached a talent peak prior to the big contract; surround that with savvy veterans and significant budget allocation to defense and that seems to be a pretty effective formula for a winner. Once that group of youth passes forward and earns the big money, that's where teams get handcuffed. It's the reason why it'll be difficult to any team repeat as Stanley Cup champs in the salary cap era.