Official NHL 2006 Off-Season Thread

[Triumph36]

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As written, the clause in the CBA which is forcing the Devils' hand is incredibly stupid. If Vladimir Malakhov had died in a skiing accident the Devils would be on the hook for his salary.

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Well like I said earlier, perhaps Lou should have bothered to read the new CBA. There's a reason why very few guys over 35 have gotten more than a 1 year deal. He gave such deals to Malakhov and Mogilny (anyone else?), it's his problem to deal with now. I don't feel the league should save him from himself.

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I don't feel like the league should save him either - it's a stupid rule, but it should apply across the board. Mogilny is injured, though, and Malakhov retired/quit/whatever. It applies to no one else on New Jersey but some other clubs have been affected - Colorado with Patrice Brisebois and Pierre Turgeon are two that come to mind.

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I understand why it is there - it's there to prevent a team from front-loading a contract for a big-name player who intends to retire so he counts very little on the cap, then he retires and his contract disappears from the cap. As such, the rule should only apply to front-loaded contracts.

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I think a different part of the CBA deals with that problem, and that is the averaging of a contract when calculating the cap hit. For example if I signed a 4 year deal for $14m, with years paying $2m, $3m, $4m, and $5m the cap hit would be $3.5m in each year, regardless of how the team wants to pay me each season. So backloading or frontloading is only an issue when trading a player now.

As for why they put that clause in there, I guess it's so teams can't get (pay off?) old players with bad contracts to retire in order to free up cap room. The NBA has a similar provision with retired players, and their cap hit can only be removed if it can be proven that a player's career was ended by injury.

I imagine in the case that a player 35 or older did die the league would remove cap hit from the team. I don't really want to find out for sure though.

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You're incorrect about this and I'm pretty sure I explained it further up the thread, but I like hearing myself talk - Let's say Jaromir Jagr wants to play only one more year, but he wants to play for $6 million. Well, that's going to strain my salary cap, but what if I tell him to sign for 7 years at 12 million? He gets the first 6 in the first year, then gets 1 each following year. So his cap average is below $2 million, but he's actually being paid 6 and has no intention of playing out the remaining 6 years. He retires at the end of the first year and boom, he's off the cap. The problem is, it has no injury provision which will ensure players over 35 with an injury history don't get multi-year deals.

I really have no idea why aliens invaded Lou's mind for those three weeks last off-season - I hated the signings from the beginning and they became even worse when the season starts.

What Lou should do is deal Vladimir Malakhov's contract to Washington - Washington has lots of empty space they're not using, and I doubt Vlad is going to show up at camp this year - if he can fob off a 2nd round pick on Washington, they'd come out ahead in that deal. I've heard the league put a stop to such talk weeks ago but it seems inherently unfair.