I wonder if you work for the league PR department or if you just haven't been paying attention to how the league operates.
I don't work for the league PR department, and I
have been paying attention to how the league operates. Hence, my comments throughout this thread and others.
To make this crystal clear, Roberto Luongo's contract was 100% legal and approved by the league until a couple years later when they retroactively said "it violates the spirit of the salary cap so we're going to punish your team harshly with cap recapture penalties".
To make this crystal clear: Roberto Luongo's contract, while 100% legal and approved by the league, was in fact written so that until "a couple years later when they retroactively said" it wasn't legal and originally wrote an incredibly punitive penalty for if he quit playing early, had Luongo quit playing at 40 [like he actually did] the cap charge to the Canucks [and later the Panthers ... and then later part the Panthers and part the Canucks] would have been
$0.00.
Had Luongo's contract only been allowed to go out to age 40, he either would have had to
* Forego years of getting paid $6,714,000 to get the cap hit down which [wait ... let me do the actuarials on this ...] would have cut a little over $20.1 million in salary off the contract but dropped the cap hit to $4,873,111;
or
* Those last 3 years would have been wiped out and the rest of the years counted "as is" and his cap hit would have been [wait ... gotta do the actuarials on this again ...] $6,709,111;
or
* The two sides would have had to restructure dollars some other way that worked for both of them [and possibly been intended to be cap-circumventing still, but it likely wouldn't have been
nearly as blatant].
Hence,
a lot of cheating [to the tune of about $12.4 million for the years that took him out to age 40] at the time that contract was signed was OK.
For the record: I had a
huge problem with the league deciding retroactively
oh, yeah, these contracts were really bad, we're going to impose massive penalties just in case. That
really was changing the rules on teams. If the contract was "good" before, the league should have sucked up and said "we f***ing hate this, but we signed off - that's our fault, we take responsibility for that, but we're stopping this going forward." The real solution, though, would have been to be proactive
way back when it started to become apparent, when I and others started sounding the alarm, and saying "whoa, let's get ahead of this and nip it in the bud instead of going full Baghdad Bob,
everything is fine, nothing is wrong, we've seen your examples, there is no cap circumvention, no one would ever do anything like that.
That was the moment I realized enforcement of Article 26 was going to be largely perfunctory. 15ish years later, nothing has shown otherwise.
Interesting how some teams get held to totally different standards than others and how it directly effects whether a team can realistically compete for a cup or not.
If "how it directly effects whether a team can realistically compete for a cup or not" was a serious concern, there would be rules in place on all kinds of stuff - spending, talent, coaching, scouting, whatever - so that every team was on equal footing, no one had any advantage over anyone else in anything, and then everyone could realistically compete for a Cup. Or, variances would be so narrow that no team was disadvantaged to the point that it couldn't "realistically compete for a cup or not." [And then we'd have arguments over where that line was drawn and how that wasn't fair to various teams, for various reasons.]
Meanwhile, in the real world, every team has the CBA-granted ability to do what Vegas, Toronto and other teams are doing. The fact that they don't, because of self-imposed restrictions, financial inability, lack of suitable circumstances or comparatively inept management [or any combination of those items and others], isn't the league's problem to solve and it's really not something that should be "fixed" by trying to make things "more fair" by targeting one team with a sledgehammer solution at the potential expense of others who may have done nothing wrong but who get the sledgehammer as well.
There's a word called verisimilitude you should become familiar with.
I'm sorry the words "I might be wrong" aren't something you're willing to say, but trying to show off with [really] big words doesn't impress me.
YMMV.
