Vegas about to circumvent cap again? UPD: Mark Stone back practicing.

[WhataKnight]

The problem with this system in terms of LTIR and the playoffs is that the grey area is simply too large to ignore.

I won’t disagree.

That said, what idea from HFBoards makes sense which the legal minds negotiating CBAs missed?

It may be that the problem lies more with the “Pegulas” of the league not putting enough into effective management than with the “Foleys”/“Viniks” needing a reprimand for doing what they can within bounds agreed upon by league, owners, and NHLPA, as stated within the CBA.

I truly would sooner see a more entertaining league where half a dozen or more different teams do this every spring than a lockout. The passive ownership and management does NOT have to be passive, and it isn’t Vegas’ fault nor Tampa Bay’s that a mechanism agreed to by all the above parties isn’t being utilized by a gun-shy ownership & management group.

 

[TheBeard]

I won’t disagree.

That said, what idea from HFBoards makes sense which the legal minds negotiating CBAs missed?

It may be that the problem lies more with the “Pegulas” of the league not putting enough into effective management than with the “Foleys”/“Viniks” needing a reprimand for doing what they can within bounds agreed upon by league, owners, and NHLPA, as stated within the CBA.

I truly would sooner see a more entertaining league where half a dozen or more different teams do this every spring than a lockout. The passive ownership and management does NOT have to be passive, and it isn’t Vegas’ fault nor Tampa Bay’s that a mechanism agreed to by all the above parties isn’t being utilized by a gun-shy ownership & management group.

The league probably has a dozen contingency plans for dealing with this come the next round of negotiations, and my guess is the circumstances regarding LTIR will be at the very least updated to address as best they can the grey area.

The reality is these kinds of “side-steppings” can only be done by teams with owners capable of handling these financially. I’d rather a league that’s fair and just for all teams and not a league that couldn’t care less.

 

[WhataKnight]

The league probably has a dozen contingency plans for dealing with this come the next round of negotiations, and my guess is the circumstances regarding LTIR will be at the very least updated to address as best they can the grey area.

The reality is these kinds of “side-steppings” can only be done by teams with owners capable of handling these financially. I’d rather a league that’s fair and just for all teams and not a league that couldn’t care less.

While I get that, as a former follower of teams that broke my heart as a kid, if the cost of competition forces these already wealthy owners to spend rather than be simultaneously complicit with a sad/angry fanbase, increased profits and their own team getting fed to lions on a near nightly basis (the Islanders went with this with Charles “at least they’re not getting killed out there” Wang, and don’t get me started on the 90’s Senators….) then I’m saving my rebukes for the weak owners.

Owners with access to as much as hundreds of millions of dollars skimping on the bread and circuses aren’t the ones to be shielded here, IMO. I’d almost not mind expanding the LTIR pool size a tiny bit in order to encourage other owners to treat their teams like the temperament of the fans matters worth a damn.

The Melnyks and Wangs didn’t have the desire to spend or executive chops; I know for damn sure Foley and Vinik do. Shit, rather than being the 5th passenger in the car that is North American pro sports, aggressive management is good entertainment, which is what sports are about - and would certainly up the profile of the league with any 8 teams separating themselves from the pack in the standings, looking across the table all season before unloading rounds like the bar scene in Inglourous Basterds.

We can agree to disagree, but rather than restricting the brashness of an owner like Bill Foley, I’d rather this whet the appetite of other owners and bring a close to the trend that sees passive owners of any non-rebuilding team pleading to fans to “trust the plan” and not simultaneously believing in their group while having the balls to arm their group to the teeth like a Colombian hit squad.

Owners of these teams have a goal - to win Cups. I’d just sooner save the throwing lemons for the owners blowing smoke rather than the ones showing the others what “will” looks like.

 

[Ted Hoffman]

"I want owners to be able to spend as much money as they want."



"Just ... not like that."

 

[RayMartyniukTotems]

"I want owners to be able to spend as much money as they want."



"Just ... not like that."

f***ing Vegas I guess the NHL allows it cause they have a f***ing hemorrhaging Arizona team so someone has to pay the bills and spark more betting and activity

 

[WhataKnight]

"I want owners to be able to spend as much money as they want."



"Just ... not like that."

FACTS.

Tampa was over the Cap and wore shirts to commemorate it.

Tampa also had an established brand and had been in the league a bit. Allegedly part-owned by the Yakuza, even! But they suffered, and they drafted and developed and got to where they got.

As much as I don’t want to hang so much as a napkin’s weight on the “hate us cuz they ain’t us” hook, it’s a messy and indelicate way to say “Vegas isn’t worthy because they haven’t suffered enough, but let’s really hate ‘em hard because their owner figuratively walked into an owner’s meeting, slapped over half a dozen of them, made the rest have to go and repark their vehicles in the cuckold spots and left the party with a liver full of Dom Perignon and a drink tab of zero.”

 

[Soundwave]

If you're going to have a hard cap, then have a hard cap.

If you want a soft cap but want to dance around it, just have a soft cap like the NBA does and get over it already. The PA is not going to complain one bit about a soft cap.

But don't this crap of claiming you have a hard cap and then some teams have $10+ million higher payroll in the playoffs.

 

[TheBeard]

While I get that, as a former follower of teams that broke my heart as a kid, if the cost of competition forces these already wealthy owners to spend rather than be simultaneously complicit with a sad/angry fanbase, increased profits and their own team getting fed to lions on a near nightly basis (the Islanders went with this with Charles “at least they’re not getting killed out there” Wang, and don’t get me started on the 90’s Senators….) then I’m saving my rebukes for the weak owners.

Owners with access to as much as hundreds of millions of dollars skimping on the bread and circuses aren’t the ones to be shielded here, IMO. I’d almost not mind expanding the LTIR pool size a tiny bit in order to encourage other owners to treat their teams like the temperament of the fans matters worth a damn.

The Melnyks and Wangs didn’t have the desire to spend or executive chops; I know for damn sure Foley and Vinik do. Shit, rather than being the 5th passenger in the car that is North American pro sports, aggressive management is good entertainment, which is what sports are about - and would certainly up the profile of the league with any 8 teams separating themselves from the pack in the standings, looking across the table all season before unloading rounds like the bar scene in Inglourous Basterds.

We can agree to disagree, but rather than restricting the brashness of an owner like Bill Foley, I’d rather this whet the appetite of other owners and bring a close to the trend that sees passive owners of any non-rebuilding team pleading to fans to “trust the plan” and not simultaneously believing in their group while having the balls to arm their group to the teeth like a Colombian hit squad.

Owners of these teams have a goal - to win Cups. I’d just sooner save the throwing lemons for the owners blowing smoke rather than the ones showing the others what “will” looks like.

Yeah, I’m not reading all that.

Sorry. My poops don’t take that long.

 

[WhataKnight]

If you're going to have a hard cap, then have a hard cap.

If you want a soft cap but want to dance around it, just have a soft cap like the NBA does and get over it already. The PA is not going to complain one bit about a soft cap.

But don't this crap of claiming you have a hard cap and then some teams have $10+ million higher payroll in the playoffs.

In to say “a soft cap is acceptable to me” before a third poster counters with “of course it’s alright with you because people want to be in Vegas.”

A soft cap would be cool; but I still feel that owners and GMs throwing gauntlets at one a other a little makes for entertaining sport. We all would have been watching Brian Burke fight Kevin Lowe in a barn had it happened back in the day, we were entertained by the spatting between the Canadiens and Hurricanes, and having known whoa it felt with “trust the plan” owners versus the Leroy Jenkins of the Desert, I’m all for encouraging more teams to validly leverage expiring contracts and LTIR making the playoffs a clash of the titans.

 

[WhataKnight]

Yeah, I’m not reading all that.

Sorry. My poops don’t take that long.

LOL…okay. To put it light for lazy reading…..

Better to commend the Foleys out there instead of rushing to the defense of weak-willed Melnyks.

For all so many people in NA (not you) scream about how bad communism is, Foley schooling the league on a Masters-level Capitalism course isn’t what would tick me off first; it would be the Meruelos/Melnyks sentencing their fans and franchises to 5-20 years of schmucking it out, waiting for Godot.

 

[TheBeard]

LOL…okay. To put it light for lazy reading…..

Better to commend the Foleys out there instead of rushing to the defense of weak-willed Melnyks.

For all so many people in NA (not you) scream about how bad communism is, Foley schooling the league on a Masters-level Capitalism course isn’t what would tick me off first; it would be the Meruelos/Melnyks sentencing their fans and franchises to 5-20 years of schmucking it out, waiting for Godot.

Oh no doubt Foley is doing the right thing so long as he can.

 

[Maple Leaf]

They are just copying tampa bay

 

[rmthomson21]

If your team's trying to compete and they're not circumventing cap while it's allowed, they're not trying that hard to compete (this includes the team I'm a fan of). This is the big leagues, baby.

 

[WhataKnight]

If your team's trying to compete and they're not circumventing cap while it's allowed, they're not trying that hard to compete (this includes the team I'm a fan of). This is the big leagues, baby.

As hard as it is to be a Knights fan in your territory, if Landy could come back for game 1/round 1?

I. Would. Not. Say. SHIT. Valid injury.

If Vegas is willing to hold the risk of losing half a dozen stars to injury at any given time (Theo, Eichel, Stone, Hertl, Stephenson, Martínez, Petro and Karlsson have all missed games, and that leaves holes in top everything), they aren’t guaranteed shit but being newsworthy whether they win or lose. It’s a risk.

 

[WhataKnight]

They are just copying tampa bay

One key difference.

In Vegas, they play a few dozen regular season games before being shut down.

 

[WhataKnight]

Side thought:

The bottom-10 and top-10 do happy cloud nice things to the trade ecosystem. No one likes quiet TDLs.

If the lottery system is largely an out-of-control tankathon, the wacky arms races on the other side could just be the natural byproduct.

There are no fewer than three other NHL franchises operating in this reality circa now.

 

[AvroArrow]

Why would players sign off on a rule that possibly prohibits any one of them from playing in a playoff game not for disciplinary reasons [which is already allowed and for understandable reasons], but for purely "financial" reasons that don't take the first dollar out of their pockets or give them even one additional dollar?

Why would they do that when there's a very real possibility that any one of them is on a team that made perfectly legal moves during the regular season within the confines salary cap system that, come the playoffs, are retroactively decided to be "against the salary cap" because it "puts the team over the salary cap for the playoffs" even if the team was never even up to the cap ceiling during the regular season and was completely cap compliant until the moment the wall clock flipped from "Regular Season" to "Playoffs?"

Why would they sign off on having a very certain, very important right (the ability to play in a playoff game when available and selected by the coach) taken away after they permissibly exercised other rights available to them under the CBA (ability to sign with any team at a mutually agreeable salary and term within the confines of the salary cap system, and the ability to exercise a NTC/NMC to move or not move to another team) to be on whatever team they happened to land on, only to find out "because you did that, and that was 100% legal at the time, it really wasn't legal at all weeks later?"

You keep positing this as "well, it's only 1 or 2 teams." Any player in the league could land on one of those 2 teams. Any player in the league could have a team that does it themselves. Any player in the league could be on a team that makes moves, stays within the cap, and suddenly gets slapped down as "yeah, well, you did that and you were cheating" and punished just like the alleged cheating teams everyone is crying about. The NHLPA is never agreeing to a rule that treats everyone as cheaters and purports to punish the real cheaters, which also punishes the real non-cheaters.

Because it would prohibit their opponent from cheating and winning the Stanley cup ? I'm sure the Florida Panthers and their fans absolutely love that Vegas circumvented the cap, shit why would they want one of them from being prohibited to play in a playoff game! Genius!

 

[GrumpyKoala]

OK, so go sell that to everyone who wants to change how the cap works and get back to me and let me know how many of them are agreeable to this.

Oh, wait:








And that's just the people I haven't blocked because they keep repeating the same thing over and over and rejecting any and all criticism like if they say it a 113th time, it will somehow finally be true.

This idea may not be universally liked. Looks like you've got a lot of work to do.



That wasn't a penalty for cap circumvention, per se. It was forcing the cap savings realized in the earlier years to be paid back.

Which, that took 2 tries because the first try would have resulted in something far more punitive under the guise of "we're fixing a problem."


All 30 owners voted for that change and the NHLPA agreed to it as well. It wasn't Gary Bettman deciding it unilaterally and telling everyone else to go f*** themselves if they didn't like it.

/newsletter unsubscribe

 

[WhataKnight]

Because it would prohibit their opponent from cheating and winning the Stanley cup ? I'm sure the Florida Panthers and their fans absolutely love that Vegas circumvented the cap, shit why would they want one of them from being prohibited to play in a playoff game! Genius!

If everyone can do this, and Florida has a legal department that should see this stuff coming, the question isn’t cheating, per the NHL, team owners, NHLPA and CBA.

The question is why didn’t Florida miss that age old Mike-from-Breaking-Bad advice and go with a half-measure?

 

[Squiffy]

More old man yelling at cloud stuff.

Need a rule change I guess? Currently fine. Same outrage on backloaded contracts, which was ultimately correct and dealt with. I don’t know how this gets legislated but also think it will be.

Points to Chicago for getting it right first in 2015.

 

[Soundwave]

Why don't they just enforce a simple rule ... the salary cap is 82.5 million ... you can't ice a roster with more than 82.5 million worth of players on it in the playoffs (X number have to be forwards + D + 2 goalies minimum).

You can acquire all these extra guys on LTIR for the regular season, but if you're going to activate your 9 million "always injured, but actually not injured magically for game 1 of the playoffs" player, that means some of your "over the top" adds have to sit and munch pop corn in the press box.

 

[TheSuperElite]

there has never been more mental gymnastics on a HFBoards thread than this one

 

[Ted Hoffman]

Because it would prohibit their opponent from cheating and winning the Stanley cup ?

By that logic, the players should have been the ones jumping up and down screaming when teams were using ultra-long, back-diving ultra-front loaded contracts to "circumvent the cap" because it helped teams cheat and gave them a better chance of winning the Stanley Cup.

I ... hopefully ... do not have to give you a reminder of who was more upset about that, but in case you need a spoiler for that:

Spoiler

It wasn't the players.

Let me say it again: you keep advocating for the players to lose rights for no other reason than I don't think it's fair. Which, ignores that your offering for change does not grant any new rights or expanded rights to any player - and no, the right to win a Cup or the right to have a good chance to compete for a Cup is not a right - but your offering definitely negatively impacts some players and potentially negatively impacts others. And, you think the NHLPA is going to go for an overall reduction in rights for its members for no other reason than ... all we are saying, is give fairness a chance.

I'm running out of ways to explain this and approaching the point where I believe you're never going to get it no matter how much I or anyone else tries to explain it.

I'm sure the Florida Panthers and their fans absolutely love that Vegas circumvented the cap, shit why would they want one of them from being prohibited to play in a playoff game! Genius!

By this measure, when the playoffs come around any team whose Playing Roster's sum of cap hits is less than some other team's Playing Roster's sum of cap hits is at an unfair advantage and someone needs to fix the rules so that the sum of cap hits for both teams is equal.

But Ted, that's ... different. Yeah, until someone permissibly has a sum of cap hits of $87 million because they planned ahead, saved cap space and added players in ways completely legal under the salary cap, and someone else went out and spent their cap space like a gluttonous fool and only has a sum of cap hits of $80 million - but, we're going to punish the 1st team for being prudent and wise / reward the 2nd team for being irresponsible at the expense of others.

 

[Ted Hoffman]

Why don't they just enforce a simple rule ... the salary cap is 82.5 million ... you can't ice a roster with more than 82.5 million worth of players on it in the playoffs (X number have to be forwards + D + 2 goalies minimum).

You can acquire all these extra guys on LTIR for the regular season, but if you're going to activate your 9 million "always injured, but actually not injured magically for game 1 of the playoffs" player, that means some of your "over the top" adds have to sit and munch pop corn in the press box.

You should talk to this guy, because he seems to think he's got a solution:

Been thinking about this and instead of instituting the cap in the playoffs...why not just remove the cap after the trade deadline? Still keeps the revenue sharing 50/50 so league and players stay happy with that, nobody could potentially miss playoffs due to cap/LTIR, nobody is punished for being injured and no need to do all this funny business, and teams with a financial advantage can use it, which I think is more than fair.

 

[bucks_oil]

I won’t disagree.

That said, what idea from HFBoards makes sense which the legal minds negotiating CBAs missed?

What did they miss? It's not that complicated. They couldn't wrap their heads around a simple concept of calculating cap based on AAV during the playoffs. Using AAV is SO simple it's the way we all calculate it on these boards every day.

Why didn't they do that, one wonders?

In the regular season, you get given $82.5M to spend over the 168 days of the season. If you happen to have some guys who are waiver ineligible (or pass without threat of being claimed) you and have players "off roster" on non-game days, effectively saving that money for the deadline... then at the deadline you can legally spend it and concentrate it on the remaining salary of a player. This gives teams who are not in LTIR an opportunity to game the system a bit, or teams that legitimately save space on the cap, an opportunity for those savings to magnify in purchasing power at the deadline (since every dollar saved from the start of season becomes 4.5X come trade deadline). I won't get into LTIR since that throws a monkey wrench in things and people generally get the concept. But yeah, lots of complexity built in to deal with day to day roster management.

TLDR: The regular season cap is quite complicated, with good reason since GMs need to manage their roster on a day-to-day basis, plenty of players will be in and out of the roster due to injuries, but the cumulative effect needs to add up to the cap and nothing more... it can easily be simplified for the playoffs.

In the playoffs: The necessary complexity above is why they scrap the cap for the playoffs (like what would be the pool of $$$ available and how do you account for one team playing only 4 games and another playing up to 28)... but to your question they overlooked an OBVIOUS solution, which is: during the playoffs, you should not be allowed to ice a lineup (or a lineup +2 press box guys, to equate to a typical 22-man roster) that based on AAV sums to more than $82.5M in any game. Remove waivers during playoffs and have a taxi squad (which doesn't count unless added to your active roster) and bam, you have all the flexibility GMs need, PLUS you are still adhering to the basis principle of a cap, you are just calculating it differently.

Honestly, what is wrong with that? And why is it so difficult to figure out?