When NHL free agency kicks off at noon today, many teams around the league will use the extra money they have under the salary cap to try to improve their squad. After issuing qualifying offers to Jason Akeson, Erik Gustafsson, Brandon Manning, and Tye McGinn — and not issuing offers to Marc-Andre Bourdon, Cullen Eddy, Tyler Brown, Kyle Flanagan, and Cal Heeter — new GM Ron Hextall is left with a bill of $236,429 over the cap. The team is allowed to go up to 10% over the hard cap.
It’s been a not-so-well kept secret that Hextall is desperately trying to dump Vinny Lecavalier and his $4.5 million salary cap hit on anyone who will take him, but as of yet that’s been nobody. In fact, due to his handcuffing by the salary cap, Hextall is more likely to make a splash in a trade than via free agency. That doesn’t mean we won’t all get a little anxious when noon rolls around, it just means that anxiety won’t be added upon or relieved. But hey, that also means no ridiculous giant contracts. That’s always nice.
UPDATE: In ultimate optimism, I mistakenly reported that the Flyers were under the cap.
19 Responses
Nowhere in that article does it mention that money as cap space. And if you go to capgeek, the Flyers are OVER the cap by that amount, not under it.
God damn it, Jim.
This type of shit is what happens when you let hipsters write articles about Philly sports.
Scott I gotta tell ya these surveys are annoying as all get out. I hope your making good money off it but I hesitate to click on your site now more than ever.
They are out of control. It seems a lot worse lately. Between the surveys and Jim, this blog is going downhill fast
I’m pretty sure they can still take off pronger’s money as well.
They can but it’s complicated. Ideally, to maximize cap space for the season, they’d send players down to the AHL to have Pronger “on the roster” and fit just under the cap. That would allow the Flyers to place Pronger on LTIR at the end of training camp and use his entire salary as freed up cap space. The problem is the Flyers don’t have many two-way contracts, not enough to get down under the cap by my calculations. So they may have to keep those players up and have less cap space throughout the season.
Without copying word for word, that’s the simplest explanation I can give. Go to capgeek, under their FAQ there’s a question about how LTIR works. It’s complicated but a good read.
Appreciate the response! But I think the fact that they can factor in being 10% over the cap helps them.. At this point , thats 6.9 million. So they still can be over about 2 million in addiiton to prongers salary until they get something worked out.
Hole is the term for the woman who sits in on and ruins most radio shows. The hole opens her mouth saying God-knows-what, adds nothing to the conversation, and chastises the guys for being politically incorrect. Sound familiar? Last week was great this week….not so much
Jim, the Flyers are over the cap by $236,429 and that doesn’t account for the fact that they will put Pronger on LTIR when the season starts, so their cap space is actually about $4.7 million. Add in the fact that teams are allowed to go 10% over the cap during the offseason means that Hextall has enough money to snatch up some of the B-level free agents.
holmgren should be shot for his nitwit contracts an rhea is funny like my granny
Come on guys, he made a mistake. Stop being so hard on him.
People make mistakes all the time. Its not the 236k under or over, its the complete lack of knowledge regarding the NHL salary cap to begin with. If you dont understand it, dont make a dumbass post attracting attention to the fact that you dont understand it. Ok, I’m over it.
The sad part is holmgren didn’t even know how pronger’s contract worked. The guy had no friggin clue what he was doing and had no business being a GM. But hey, who needs culture change or dean Lombardi.
Did The Flyers Know Pronger Was Really 35 years Old?
The next question is whether the Flyers knew Pronger would be considered 35 years old for the purpose of the CBA.
I can’t say for sure. However, the surrounding circumstances suggest it is possible that the Flyers missed something.
Pronger makes most of his money in the first 5 years of his contract, taking home $33,400.00 of his $34,450,000. In the last 2 years of his deal, however, he makes just $525,000 per season. Pronger would be 40 and 41 years old in those last two seasons.
This strongly suggests that the Flyers and Pronger did not expect the defenceman to play out the last two years of his deal, when he would have been in his 40s. His salary is so low that it suggests that the final 2 years of the deal were included strictly to artificially lower the yearly cap hit. By adding in those 2 years, the cap hit dropped from $6.68 million to $4.9 million.
(On the basis, the arbitrator in the Kovalchuk circumvention case fingered Pronger’s contract as constituting a circumvention of the cap, which I warned could happen).
So if the Flyers didn’t expect Pronger to play into his 40s, then it is reasonable to conclude that the team expected him to retire. If that’s the case, and assuming no team wants to be saddled with a $4.9 cap hit for 2 years for someone who is playing shuffleboard with Betty White and Gavin MacLeod, then the assumption seems to be that the Flyers may have thought Pronger’s salary would not count against the cap since he was 34 years old when he signed the contract.
If the Flyers knew that Proger would be considered 35 years old under the CBA, then his contract would have likely been structured differently.
That was an awful lot of effort for something that people stopped reading 10 words in.
Hearing Vinny deal is very alive in the PM today. NASH, MTL, BOS all involved thus far….
No team is going to take him until after the Flyers pay him the $2M bonus they owe him tomorrow. I doubt any team will take him even after that. 4-years/$16.5M is a lot to pay for an oft-injured 34-year-old center with very little left in the tank. (But don’t tell Holmgren that…)
It is owed to him today….
Yeah, for some reason I thought it was due on July 2.
Correction: Lecavalier got his $2M bonus at noon today. Fingers crossed…
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