Fourier
Registered User
I understand the impact of dead cap space. That was never the question. The point is that if you replace a player with someone as good or better where the combination of the new contract and the required dead cap space is less than the cap hit of the player being replaced your team is ahead of the game even with the dead cap.So- a better way, sometimes an easier way, is to look at dead cap as reduced cap space. So, say in your example, you buy out Campbell and his cap penalty is 2.6M. Say the overall cap is at 90M. You are immediately handcuffing yourself because you have 87.4M to fill out your roster and your competing with teams, let’s say Florida, who have a 90M cap to work with. You’re handicapping yourself for 6 years (length of the buyout). So, through McDavid’s prime years you have been trying to win a cup with a smaller cap than many of the top contenders. What does that mean- well- 2.6M accrued to the deadline is like an 8M player. Ad in retention and you could add two very good players. For a real life example - Neal’s 1.9M accrued to the deadline and the 2 mill they had could have gotten a Tanev (if Calgary dealt to us- just using it as an example) and Guentzal.
Now add in a Nurse retention of the 2M you mentioned. That’s 86M of cap space vs other teams 90M for 4 years, plus an additional 2 years for Campbell. Again, handicapping yourself during McDavid’s prime years. There is a reason why cup winning teams don’t have dead cap- you need to maximize your dollars. Using the same example 2M Nurse retained this summer, 1.3M Campbell buyout this summer, 1.9M Neal dead cap remaining, Browns 3M bonus. Say it’s Florida and Edmonton in the finals again next year. You are asking the Edmonton Oilers to build a team on 82M than what Florida can build on 90M (again, just using 90M as an example). The quality of player you can get for 8.3M- I’ll let you decide. That 8.3M accrued to the deadline is worth substantially more.
These numbers are hypothetical and players names are hypotheticals- it was just an example to show you why dead cap is a terrible, terrible way to manage your team. Last I checked, in the modern cap era- cup winning teams don’t have dead cap.
I hope my word salad kind of explains it.
The bolded statement above actually supports my position rather than hurts it. Remember, the alternative to the $2.6M is having Campbell at $5M potentially as a back-up, which is the premise of the buyout. Assuming you can replace him for say $1.5M if the resulting space was all allowed to accrue this move would buy you roughly $4M more at the deadline than you would have keeping Campbell on the roster.
Now if you are suggesting that a better strategy would be to use assets to trade Campbell with no retention then there would certainly be more cap. However, the issue then is the cost of those assets which in the case of Campbell could be a 1st++ given the Oilers lack of high end tradable non-draft pick assets That first is at the same time the most valuable asset you have to acquire impact players at the deadline. So while you have more cap space to spend you have less capital to spend to get that impact player.
I have advocated looking for creative ways to try and reduce possible dead space while also managing the assets you send out. Utah for example does not have a single NHL defenseman under contract next year and they have a ton of cap space and probably will for years. The Oilers may well want to move on from one or both of Kulak and Ceci. They have more picks than they can reasonably use already so what they need is live bodies.
To Utah: Kulak, Ceci, Campbell at 50%.
To Edmonton: Future Considerations
Utah buys out Campbell for $4.5M spread out over 6 years.
In this case, the Oilers would start the year with $20.5M in cap space.