In addition to the front office loving him, another reason Suter probably isn’t getting bought out is the Stars will already go into next season with $2.6 million of dead cap money because of performance bonuses being paid to Pavelski, Stankoven, Lundkvist, and Harley. This is the downside of using LTIR to go over the cap because it punts those performance bonus cap hits to the next season.
Pavelski’s contract was purposely structured this way to allow them to spread his cap hit over two seasons. Vegas isn’t the only team doing funny cap math under the rules.
While the cap will go up $4 million next season, the Stars will already have consumed over half of it paying for this season’s roster. Buying Suter out would add another $783k in dead cap money.
FYI, their bonus carryover penalty going into this season was only $372k.