With the trade, the Ice now have two overagers (Dustin Sylvester is the other) while the Broncos are down to four. But one of Swift Current's is Matt Tassone, who is likely to miss the first month or more of the season recovering from offseason surgery. So the Broncos will probably be allowed to keep four overagers past the cut-down deadline since Tassone will be on the long-term injured list. Once he comes off the list the Broncos will have to make a move though.
One other note today, on the NHL front there's yet another long, long, loooong term contract today with the Vancouver Canucks having signed Roberto Luongo to a 12 year, $64 million contract.
Is it just me, or is anyone else sick of the hypocrisy of NHL owners? They whined and moaned for two decades about needing a salary cap to keep the league viable and no sooner do they get one, than they set about finding ways to get around it. I'm not singling out Vancouver here since several other teams have signed players to these moronic 6+ year deals too, but let's be honest: the only purpose of these deals is to get around the salary limitations of the salary cap.
Roberto Luongo will not be playing when he's 43 years old in the last year of this deal. He'll have retired a few years before that (at least) and will have already received almost all of that $64 million prior to his retirement (which is obviously good for him), while the Canucks enjoy the benefit of a lower annual cap hit - since they can average the $64 million over 12 years whether he plays all 12 years or not - and the ability to take the remainder of the contract off their cap altogether when Luongo retires (which is obviously good for them).
The salary cap is $56.8M this year. A team could sign six players to these kind of contracts, in which they actually get paid $10 or $12 million this year, but their cap hit is, say, $5 million a year each. That's only $30 million against the cap for those players but $60 to $70 million in actual salary this year. What is the purpose of a salary cap then?
So, remind me again: why did we lose the entire 2004-05 season?
1 comment:
You are less suspicious than I. I would go so far as to say that the whole plan behind these decade+ long deals is to plan to buy out the last 3 or 4 years of the contract when they are 38 or 39 years old. This way the player recieves near the full amount of the contract, in 8 years, while maintaining a low salary cap hit.
What is next? Paying top players in the league 500k per season, and then contracting them to paint the locker room every season for 9 million dollars?
Post a Comment