Wednesday Caps Clips

Not any more.

More and less plausible — as KHTaD says below, it is more plausible than Zetterberg since his salary is more or less a constant throughout. If it tailed off, it would be the least plausible in the league. Ovechkin is going to kill himself out on the ice way before 36.

Zetterberg’s tails off which makes it pretty BS, but at the same time there’s only 2 “freebie” years and it isn’t totally insane to claim he’ll be playing at nearly 40, nor would his value to a team be more than $1m/year.

More important than whether he is still playing is that his salary will still be at a level comparable to the rest of his contract.

Yes. It’s in the interest of ~2/3 (if not more) of the PA for this contract to fail.

Plus, the PA is a hot mess right now – one wonders if the League would have even rejected the deal in the first place if not for that fact.

Because we could sign Eric Belanger to a 2-3 year deal and it would count as a 35+ despite the fact that he’s not that old. Then a career ending knee injury sticks his cap hit on the books regardless. The guys that are 33ish would be punished unfairly, IMO.

Unless the player retires before 35?

I like the concept; it’s pretty easy to enforce.

I could also modify it to say any contract for 7+ years. I have more of a problem with the long deals projecting a player playing into his 40s than the short ones; at least in the short ones you have a reasonable idea the guy is still going to be playing.

But from the opposite angle. Instead of players signing deals knowing they can walk it’s the owners that know they can walk.

Exactly. And I think this contract was just blatant enough to get them over the benefit of the doubt that the Pronger and Hossa deals have. It’s a tough spot for the NHL, and I don’t think anyone wants them liberally rejecting contracts, but there’s gotta be a line, right? People complain they let these deals go, and now they complain that they finally rejected one? It’s not like there is a more egregious example of cap circumvention in the entire league, so if any deal was going to be rejected, shouldn’t it have been Kovy’s?

J.P. – I re-read article 26 of the CBA last night and its pretty vague in this area. I think they were anticipating other forms of circumvention, not this one. If it goes to arbitration (I highly doubt it will), what do you think the league’s chances are given that they didn’t prohibit the Hossa & Pronger deals? Sounds like you think they are good.

Right, all of which is the very definition of cap circumvention, which is expressly prohibited in the CBA.

This contract might have skated by if LouLam hadn’t come out right after the signing and said that he’d like to see these kind of deals banned in the future. It was as if he was rubbing Bettman’s nose in it saying “Yeah I beat the system and there’s nothing you can do about it but let’s close the loophole before someone else does it again.” He basically forced Bettman to take action.

Even if it’s just a similar leap in percenage, not actual money.

Look at Pronger’s

Which would be tolerable if the cap hit followed the same line.

I would disagree with that, based on the next two seasons. He is getting $6M each for those, which are his prime years. And all the years after 40 are clearly nothing more than a way to drop the cap hit.

There is an arbitrariness about this that I find unsettling. 17 years and $102M is “bad,” but 15 years and $102M is “good” (ok, “acceptable”). Where is that guideline in the CBA, or has this been reduced to a “Goldilocks” argument…. “this contract is tooooooooooo big…. this contract is tooooooooooo small…”

exactly. Had the Flyers not gone and screwed it up, right after the NHL put everyone on notice NOT to try these loophole contracts, I think the league may have rejected the contract. But sine the Flyers will be dealing with a sizable cap hit for the next seven years, well, let them lie in the grave they dug.

Which begs the question of why the Devils went ahead with the press conference before the league had formerly approved the contract? Further egging on the league to take action?

I think Lou is dumb as a fox. Read his comments at the presser. Basically slamming his ownership and Bettman at the same time, astonishing the NJD beat writers who observed they’d never seen anything like it from him. I wouldn’t be surprised one bit if his intent was to torpedo a deal he already knew was shaky (or to make himself seem like even more of an oracle in the event it was voided).

Drop a double in the baby, half blue the zip and then run a stinger to the kicker.

Problem is I think some who use escrow term aren’t clear what the situation is.

I think using the term regressive tax, as Tyler Dellow does in the article knee high linked to, would be better. The tax component of escrow is what most people mean, including myself, when term escrow is used. But, even then I don’t think it is perfect due to how salary vs cap hit issue plays in. I know that is still a tax issue, but its also then how revenue gets redistributed in the player pool. If that makes any sense? What term would you prefer G.O.D.?

Don’t tell Pittsburgh.

Agreed.

PWC is.

No, but I’ve worked in and dipped up to “NOVA proper” more than once, and Woodbridge is on NOVA outskirts, friend.

We’re going to vote for Japers’ Rink for best Italian too, right?

As long as the second isn’t Japers’…

Malware! Ooooo, that evil, evil malware.
/facepalm

And they said they’d disqualified someone, but this one looks new.