Article: NHL May Try to Fix This Salary Cap Loophole

[Thomas Williams]

View full article

[B1GKappa97]

FIRST

As for the playoff cap... do it. 

[bisopher]

Agreed that it's past time to fix the LTIR loophole.  The best option I've heard is to require each team's roster to be at or under the regular season per-game salary cap.  This will probably be seen as too restrictive, but hopefully a small (10%, not more than 15-20% for sure) increase can be agreed to.

[bisopher]

Oh, and congrats to the Panthers, and to Sam Bennett for the Conn Smythe.  Pretty sure we can put to bed any chance he's coming to MN now, his price just went waaay up.

[Imyourhuckleberry]

1 hour ago, bisopher said:

This will probably be seen as too restrictive, but hopefully a small (10%, not more than 15-20% for sure) increase can be agreed to.

Wouldn't 10% be an additional $9.5M contract?

It seems like 5% should be sufficient.

Definitely shouldn't be more than 10%.

[bisopher]

21 minutes ago, Imyourhuckleberry said:

Wouldn't 10% be an additional $9.5M contract?

It seems like 5% should be sufficient.

Definitely shouldn't be more than 10%.

Yes, agreed. I knew that the number shouldn't be excessive, but I didn't complete the math. 5% to maybe 10% should more than enough.

[MrCheatachu]

There needs to be a fix, the 'honor' system isnt working.

Personally, last season the Landeskog situation pissed me off the most.  Yeah, I get it...its a phenomonal story that a guy blew out his knees to get a cup, and had not played professionally for 3 years and is then ready to go and put up 4 points in 5 games of the playoffs for the Avs?  If his AHL conditioning stint finished up a DAY earlier, the Avalanche would not have been able to afford to get Brock Nelson at the TDL.  Landeskog's $7M aav did not hit the colorado cap at any point in the regular season.

Am i arguing that the Landeskog comeback wasnt an insane story and the dude being able to play professionally again is super fricking awesome?  No...I'm arguing that the team prevented a healthy player from coming back to their roster in order to fit a TDL acquired player.  That needs to be fixed.

[MNCountryLife]

IMO:  Personally I don't care if they have an unlimited cap space for the playoffs.  As long as the team you ice is under that cap.  Once you choose the team you want to ice for the playoffs that is the team you get unless an injury occurs at which time you can pick from the non-iced players to join the team.  This would allow you to have a high value replacement, but not a stacked team on the ice.  

[MNCountryLife]

1 hour ago, Imyourhuckleberry said:

Wouldn't 10% be an additional $9.5M contract?

It seems like 5% should be sufficient.

Definitely shouldn't be more than 10%.

I'm not sure why a team should be able to have a cap advantage over another team with the exception of an injury.  A solution like this would diminishes the problem but does not resolve it.

[Imyourhuckleberry]

15 minutes ago, MNCountryLife said:

I'm not sure why a team should be able to have a cap advantage over another team with the exception of an injury.  A solution like this would diminishes the problem but does not resolve it.

I don't disagree. It wasn't my solution, I was only saying that if they use a solution like this, the percentage above the cap should be low, but teams would need to be able to add in for injuries. The 5% margin would give them opportunities to add lower cost contract players to fill in.

If teams entered the playoffs cap compliant, but had numerous injuries, you could allow infinite injury replacements as long as the replacements have contracts within 50% of the NHL minimum contracts.

What I mean by that is that if the minimum contract is $800k, you could replace any injured player with an injury fill-in who has a contract value of $1.2M or less. Even 100% above the minimum might be acceptable, but I agree that having an extra $9M player above the salary cap, or even $5M, seems kind of ridiculous. There are a lot of really good players in the $4M-$6M range.

[mnfaninnc]

Who are we kidding? The solution will be put into place the year the Wild use LTIR and have Kaprizov ready to go in the playoffs after having been injured for half the season.

Expect a multi-season cap penalty as the retribution for such a sin.

[Scalptrash]

Fix the playoff format while you're at it Bettman. Lose the stupid divisional format and go back to seeds, like everyone else.

[raithis]

48 minutes ago, Scalptrash said:

Fix the playoff format while you're at it Bettman. Lose the stupid divisional format and go back to seeds, like everyone else.

It's a huge reason why the Wild haven't made it out of the first round in so long.  The Central is typically stronger on average than the Pacific, and the Wild typically have a fairly hard path in the bracket because of it.

That, and the games are late regardless of who we play, so that isn't a reason to keep it.

[raithis]

2 hours ago, MNCountryLife said:

IMO:  Personally I don't care if they have an unlimited cap space for the playoffs.  As long as the team you ice is under that cap.  Once you choose the team you want to ice for the playoffs that is the team you get unless an injury occurs at which time you can pick from the non-iced players to join the team.  This would allow you to have a high value replacement, but not a stacked team on the ice.  

In theory it sounds fine, but part of a limit is to provide balance.  If a team is able to load up on reserves, then the owners with the deepest pockets have a better chance of having winning teams, because they aren't losing as much talent/skill when a player gets injured, whereas other teams with owners who won't (or can't) buy the extra reserve players are at a disadvantage if anyone gets injured.

With the salary cap going up as fast as it is, there is already going to be an issue where smaller market teams will have trouble keeping pace.  Doing what you are suggesting would make it even harder for those teams to compete, especially since the larger markets teams will be more likely to have owners with the wealth to buy player insurance for the playoffs.

LTIR is already insurance enough.  I'm not opposed to adding something like $5M to the cap for the playoffs, but anything else and it starts to defeat the purpose of the cap in the first place.  It shouldn't be a lot.  Everyone should be on a level playing field regardless of market or owner.  That's the only way to keep it fair.

 

Edited June 18 by raithis
Mistyped

[MNCountryLife]

19 hours ago, raithis said:

LTIR is already insurance enough.  I'm not opposed to adding something like $5M to the cap for the playoffs, but anything else and it starts to defeat the purpose of the cap in the first place.  It shouldn't be a lot.  Everyone should be on a level playing field regardless of market or owner.  That's the only way to keep it fair.

I don't think LTIR is insurance enough.  Teams are abusing it and stacking teams for the playoffs.  It is a good mechanism to allow teams to replace players that will be gone for extended periods ...so I wouldn't eliminate it.  But why should that team be able to ice all the players once they come off the LTIR for the playoffs.  The team on the ice should not be able to exceed the cap.  If a player is replaced they cannot return to the lineup for the remainder of the playoffs.  No player is going to want to be replaced and no player is going to want to sit in the press box during the playoffs.  Yet teams do get injured and the reason for removing the cap is to allow that team to keep a full lineup.  

[raithis]

4 hours ago, MNCountryLife said:

I don't think LTIR is insurance enough.  Teams are abusing it and stacking teams for the playoffs.  It is a good mechanism to allow teams to replace players that will be gone for extended periods ...so I wouldn't eliminate it.  But why should that team be able to ice all the players once they come off the LTIR for the playoffs.  The team on the ice should not be able to exceed the cap.  If a player is replaced they cannot return to the lineup for the remainder of the playoffs.  No player is going to want to be replaced and no player is going to want to sit in the press box during the playoffs.  Yet teams do get injured and the reason for removing the cap is to allow that team to keep a full lineup.  

That's kind of what I was saying. 

Give teams a small cushion to work around an injury or two, but not so much that they can heavily abuse it.  $5M seems reasonable.

And no, I don't mean 5% even though that's about what it would be.  It's meant to be a bit of flexibility, not anything more than that.  That said, I'd be totally fine with the cap staying the same in the playoffs too.

One other thing I would push if the cap isn't kept the same in the playoffs as in the regular season is that if you have a player that has been on LTIR since the trade deadline, then that player is not eligible to return Game 1.  Using LTIR to stack talent should have a deterrent.  Maybe the player cannot return until the 10th game, or maybe the amount you go over the regular season cap in the playoffs means that much counts against next year's cap (and your team is ineligible to get a lottery pick in the following year's draft).  If you stack your team and miss, you probably lose players you wanted to keep.  The team should not get to gain if that cap constraint causes a bad year.

Those are somewhat silly ideas, but if we don't have a rigid cap ceiling on what teams can have for rosters in the playoffs, then there has to be a somewhat harsh penalty for trying to exploit and use more of it. 

Overall, my preference is a hard limit of some sort as it's just fairer overall.