If Karlsson happens, that deal in principle with TDA most likely doesn't happen anymore unless we trade other existing roster defensemen away as part of the trade for him or in relation to other free agency moves in constructing our roster for next year…...
The one and only thing that drives me nuts about cap friendly is how they try to project next year's roster by sticking minor leaguers on our projected cap and they always get it so wrong. I'm going assume it's because we aren't the center of the hockey universe so they are just clueless about our team........
Right now CapFriendly show us with 15 forwards on our roster, 14 under the “forwards” section and they are showing Svech under long term injured reserve... I don’t have any current medical updates about how well he is recovering… given the power of youth and high end PT programs for these teams, there is the shot he is ready for opening night if he is on the early side of timetable range. Worst case it's a month or two into the season assuming no complications.. So I can give them a pass on putting Svech under LTIR... But putting Rees, Suzuki, Pony AND Drury on our team cap as if they will all be on the big club roster opening night is so not happening. We aren’t carrying 14 forwards on our roster/cap unless forced to do it because of short term injuries…. So why cap friendly is showing it that way makes zero sense and thus peeves me
…. It skews showing the public looking at the CapFriendly Canes page how much cap room we actually do have.
Depending on what we do moves wise, we may carry 13 forwards and 7 dmen on the roster assuming we have plenty of cap space to run that way. But we easily can run 12/6 and hide some league min guys in the luggage compartment of the plane for the long road trip to start the season... or otherwise do things paperwork wise to have injury replacements that dont count on the cap officially...
The point being... if we are trying to squeeze an elite, mind bending roster of 6 world class d-men that includes EK and Chatfield having to sit in the pressbox to make room, then you adjust and do what you need to do to be cap compliant and keep your options open to keep making moves to our benefit...
Sorry… that is my waaaaaaaaaaaaay too looooooong winded way of saying if you remove Rees, Pony, Suzuki from our cap on cap friendly, we currently have $5.32m in cap space in a 12/6/2 goalie arrangement burying PK in the minors so his full 2m cap hit doesn't count and that includes Svech as one of the active 12 forwards.
If you put Svech on LTIR at the start of the season and one of those minor leaguers (or a different league min guy we sign) plays so we have 12 forwards total while Svech is on LTIR, then we have $12.3m+ in total cap space including the LTIR space….. and that accounts for the $775K cap hit of the guy taking Svech's roster spot so we have 12 forwards...
With Svech on LTIR to start the season you roughly are looking at the following lineup at that 12.3m+ LTIR cap space to make other moves:
Bunting - Aho - Jarvis
TT - KK - Necas
Martinook - Staal - Fast
Noesen - Drury - Pono/Rees/free agent signing aka Stephan at league min
Slavin - Burns
Skjei - Pesce
Orlov - Chatfield
Anderson - Raanta
Not ideal in terms of improved forward lineup, but we can roll with 6 d men above without having to do anything with Skjei/Pesce and still have the $12.3M+ in cap space…
Return Svech back to the lineup from LTIR and send the extra 4th liner down and we have $5.3m+ accruing towards a crazy amount of deadline cap space to make moves then..
Get to the damn point, you say? We have a lot more cap space available to us with Pesce/Skjei staying on the roster than what people seem to be thinking, and certainly more than CapFriendly is showing on their website right now... We can make some big moves and still potentially keep one or both of Pesce/Skjei on the team as an own rental... or We can make some big moves and (assuming we didn't have to trade either of those D men as part of the trade) we can move those dmen for futures and the freed up cap space or as part of another bigger move to improve the forwards...
Whew......
OK... on to the Karlsson rumor now that I've laid the groundwork in a way too long rambling way.....
So we can trade for Karlsson right now and take his full 11.5m cap hit on and be compliant with the off-season salary cap+10% overage rule. We likely don’t want to do that for *many* obvious reasons not only in terms of not wanting him at full 11.5m salary for the next 4 years, but also what it would do in terms of boxing us in trying to make other moves once he is on the roster and we can’t activate Svech when he is healthy because we are over the cap and teams aren’t going to just ignore that when we are forced to make moves to get compliant…. we absolutely for sure would have to trade multiple high salary players off the roster to get compliant in this kind of situation… but since there is zero chance we are going to take on Karlsson's contract with full cap hit of 11.5m it’s a moot point and thus the only situation where we would *have* to move multiples of Sjkei/Pesce/others is also moot…
Given our current non LTIR and LTIR cap situation described above and given that we can exceed the cap by 10% during the summer until the season starts, we can also easily trade for Karlsson right now in a direct trade with San Jose at $3m retained, which is the max amount of salary that SJS are rumored to be willing to retain in a trade for EK…. It makes things much more difficult to do anything else with the roster if we have EK at $8.5m on the books. We would have to move someone to get compliant when Svech is ready to come back, But again it can be done if we want to trade for Karlsson right now before we do anything else with the roster... We can take him straight up at $8.5M in a 3M retained direct trade and we dont have to do anything to get cap compliant until Svech is ready to come back... Even then, we can solve the cap compliance any number of ways that dont necesarily require Skjei or Pesce to be traded... Assuming SJS don’t want Skjei or Pesce as part of the trade package, they can be on the roster along with Karlsson in this situation and we wouldn’t have to trade either of them until Svech is ready to come off LTIR…
The timing of everything and what we do in a trade for Karlsson in terms of whether or not we involve a third team to get double retention will dictate what happens with Sjkei/Pesce.
However, a roster than includes the following d-pairings is mind boggling to think of:
Slavin - Karlsson
Orlov - Burns
Skjei - Pesce
Chatfield
If SJ wants nothing but prospects and futures in a straight trade for EK, we need to address it in one of two ways to make him fit under the cap upon Svech return from LTIR:
1) assuming we get EK at $8.5M we would need to trade roster players in some combination that reduces the cap of the rest of the roster besides EK by $2.73M. This is what the roster would look like with EK at $8.5M and no other changes:
| FORWARDS | 2023-24 |
| Aho, Sebastian | $8,460,250 |
| Svechnikov, Andrei | $7,750,000 |
| Teräväinen, Teuvo | $5,400,000 |
| Kotkaniemi, Jesperi | $4,820,000 |
| Bunting, Michael | $4,500,000 |
| Necas, Martin | $3,000,000 |
| Staal, Jordan "C" | $2,900,000 |
| Fast, Jesper | $2,400,000 |
| Martinook, Jordan "A" | $1,800,000 |
| Drury, Jack | $925,000 |
| Jarvis, Seth | $894,167 |
| Noesen, Stefan | $762,500 |
| Total | $43,611,917 |
| |
| DEFENSE | 2023-24 |
| Karlsson, Erik "A" | $8,500,000 |
| Orlov, Dmitri | $7,750,000 |
| Slavin, Jaccob "A" | $5,300,000 |
| Burns, Brent | $5,280,000 |
| Skjei, Brady | $5,250,000 |
| Pesce, Brett | $4,025,000 |
| Chatfield, Jalen | $762,500 |
| Total | $36,867,500 |
| |
| GOALIES | 2023-24 |
| Andersen, Frederik | $3,400,000 |
| Kochetkov, Pyotr ** - amount that cant be buried with PK in minors | $850,000 |
| Raanta, Antti | $1,500,000 |
| Total | $5,750,000 |
| |
| Grand Total Salary Cap for all Players | $86,229,417 |
| Salary Cap for 2023 - 2024 Season | $83,500,000 |
| Current Salary Cap Space | ($2,729,417) |
We could trade Skjei, Pesce, TT or some other combo of roster players such that the net effect is we lower the cap hit of the rest of the roster at least $2.7M+ and get us cap compliant... If we want Skjei/Pesce to be our third pairing with Charfield as the #7 dman (imagine typing that!! Sjkei/Pesce as the #5/6 dmen in our group!), we trade TT or some other combo... If we dont want to roll out Skjei/Pesce as our 3rd pair and spend that much cap on the bottom d pairing and leave Chatfield as the injury replacement/pressbox #7 dman guy, then we trade one or both Pesce/Skjei to recover as many of the assets as we can that we will have spent in getting Karlsson in the first place.
This becomes a moot point if SJ takes one of the above roster players back as part of the trade for EK either because they want them to play the year on the SJ roster or want to extend them to cover the time period of their rebuild... or they could be wanting to flip the player to get a haul of resources themselves either kind of like we would do in the right situation rather than lose them at the end of the year to free agency because we can't afford to give the term and AAV they want to re-sign.... San Jose could easily get a haul even for a non-extended Pesce for example... That would be what we would be doing ourselves in an attempt to get back prospects and draft picks we would give up getting Karlsson on a futures only trade...
2) We can get a third team involved to do double retention on the Karlsson contract... If SJ retains 3 million getting it down to $8.5M, we could convince a Chicago or another rebuilding team to take on the retention of another 50% to get his cap hit down to $4.25M or even if they took on $3M x 4 = $12M cap hit for the 4 years... we could give them a first round pick ++ for that... in terms of actual true salary, its not $12M total as the EK contract was front loaded a bit... actual cash remaining of the $46M cap hit is actually only $39M, or 84.78% of the AAV. So that team only has to actually pay $10.17M in real dollars... Toronto paid a first round pick for the Marleau thing and we are seeing dollars cost even less than that in recent events... we could likely get that extra $3M for a first and a few prospects, maybe a few lower round picks as well...
Imagine that same roster shown above as the true opening day roster that we dont have to trade anyone to be cap compliant? Imagine us doing an "own rental" on Skjei/Pesce for the year as our 3rd pair and try to go further towards a cup not with that high end forward we all think we need but rather by icing a crazy d corp instead? That extra $3m retained by another team in a 3 way deal would mean we could ice the roster above and literally have Chatfield sitting in the pressbox as injury insurance! or we have the option to use Skjei/Pesce as our 3rd pairing for most of the regular season and then trade Skjei/Pesce for a haul at the trade deadline if we find the experiment isnt working and we really do need a forward boost? It just depends on what Karlsson wants to do and what SJ wants in a trade.....
Lots of options.... all of it just waiting to see what Karlsson wants to do and how difficult SJ wants to be about getting a trade done.... But a stupid long post showing that it is absolutely possible to add EK to the Canes roster without blowing up our salary cap... All that crazy good management of the cap allows us the flexibility to do these kinds of things that other teams can only dream about being able to do... We get a lot of abuse and ignorant commentary from media as being cheap... but more and more grudging respect leaking out at times from those seeing how successful we have been at sticking to our guns on this philosophy and how we have been able to find ways to build the roster without getting stuck with a lot of bad contracts....
