Eastside's Hockey Elite Collide

Hey Guys,

Adam being a busy guy and all, he's asked me to take over as the league's "capologist," or "Di Capo di Tutti Capi." This doesn't make me the salary cap hardass or anything, just that I'm going to try to keep up with you busy people and post the league-wide salary cap figures here on a semi-regular basis. (Especially important as we near the trade deadline.)

I've gone through the league quickly once, and haven't found anyone over the cap, although there are two or three, iirc, who are under the floor. I should be able to post the actual numbers later today. If you have any questions, feel your numbers are wrong, or want to make donations to my office, please post here or send me a pm. Oh, and if anyone has high-level skills with functions in Excel, please do send me a pm.

I'm going to start cracking down on teams below the cap floor. I know NYI has been under for most of the season, and I know PHX has been close all year. I know it's hard to do as we move along, but start claiming some of the guys who get released who have some unappealing salaries but are decent pieces. Like a Josh Gorges. I am beyond shocked that he cleared waivers, as I'm sure he's better than at least one or two of the defensemen on the lower teams in the league. 1.1M wasn't a bad price tag either.

And major thanks go out to Mr. Pat Webber for taking on this position. Also, while we're here, big thanks to Glen and Dan (PHX and SJ) for agreeing to serve as our backup trade committee members if a deal involves a Committee team and produces a split vote or two Committee teams and we need two votes.

Thanks, gentlemen!

League Cap Figures as of 2/6/10

(This does not take injuries into account, nor any pending trades. It does take into account waived players who count against the cap.)

(First run-through here; post any mistakes you find. I didn't check my list twice, so it's possible I may have missed a zero or transposed numbers somewhere.)

ANA -- 50,187,000
ATL -- 44,647,177
BOS -- 54,275,833
BUF -- 56,011,190
CGY -- 55,975,333
CAR -- 53,900,000
CHI -- 52,686,208
COL -- 44,012,500
CBS -- 56,869,027
DAL -- 51,839,167
DET -- 57,943,989
EDM -- 53,687,500
FLA -- 44,611,666
LA -- 53,427,500
MIN -- 49,392,499
MTL -- 46,235,143
NYI -- 41,340,833
NYR -- 53,603,332
NAS -- 53,604,166
NJ -- 44,205,000
OTT -- 58,558,333
PHI -- 56,264,345
PHX -- 46,100,000
PIT -- 57,201,666
SJ -- 54,855,000
STL -- 46,410,000
TB -- 55,418,939
TOR -- 52,371,667
VAN -- 56,071,667
WSH -- 57,610,129

When you say this does not take injuries into count, does that mean my Capo di Tutti Capi includes Malone's salary?

Penguin wrote:When you say this does not take injuries into count, does that mean my Capo di Tutti Capi includes Malone's salary?

The injury exemption is for 2 week injuries and longer. So, yes, you can go over the cap by Malone's salary. So 58.5 + Malone's salary is what you can go over.

In other words, WSH's cap is like 67M right now.

I was wondering why I was over the cap. Then I realized I signed Campoli, Lee and Volchenkov to extensions that kick in next year. But they show up as current contracts in the game. So I should be under by a couple hundred thousand.

SypherSens wrote:I was wondering why I was over the cap. Then I realized I signed Campoli, Lee and Volchenkov to extensions that kick in next year. But they show up as current contracts in the game. So I should be under by a couple hundred thousand.

Vic, honestly, I'm not sure how to feel about that. I haven't signed any extensions, but as you can see from the Contract forum, the extensions are coming in hot and heavy now. Lots of teams have already signed guys to extensions and are still under the cap. It's not really worth Pat's or the Committee's time to go back and look at the current contract numbers and use those toward the cap.

I understand that they are extensions that kick in next year, but I think that it makes the most sense to go with what is listed in the players tab of EHM.

If you have someone who is a scratch or something, you can just send them down and note that they are your first call-up at that position.

If that was the case, I probably would've waited until the end of the season to resign them.

Guess I can send down Donovan if everyone promises not to claim him lol.

SypherSens wrote:If that was the case, I probably would've waited until the end of the season to resign them.

I understand what you're saying. It's just a matter of not having to go through NHLNumbers or CapGeek, because, quite frankly, we'd have to go through every single team. Almost everybody's signed somebody. Shame that EHM is limited in its capacity to do what we really want it to do, but it's what we have to work with.

Will there be a penalty for a team that goes below the cap floor due to injured players?

Parker wrote:Will there be a penalty for a team that goes below the cap floor due to injured players?

This is a good question, and having made a couple deals I'm worried about this situation in the future.

It seems like a no-brainer to me. Obviously a team should be penalized for intentionally being under/over the cap, but we can't control injuries and it doesn't seem reasonable (for example) for me to go out and find another $5M/season player to replace Havlat's salary while he's out for ten months.

Commissioner (CBJ) wrote:

Penguin wrote:In other words, WSH's cap is like 67M right now.

This is only for the duration of Ovechkin's injury, correct?

Commissioner (CBJ) wrote:

SypherSens wrote:I was wondering why I was over the cap. Then I realized I signed Campoli, Lee and Volchenkov to extensions that kick in next year. But they show up as current contracts in the game. So I should be under by a couple hundred thousand.

Vic, honestly, I'm not sure how to feel about that. I haven't signed any extensions, but as you can see from the Contract forum, the extensions are coming in hot and heavy now. Lots of teams have already signed guys to extensions and are still under the cap. It's not really worth Pat's or the Committee's time to go back and look at the current contract numbers and use those toward the cap.

I understand that they are extensions that kick in next year, but I think that it makes the most sense to go with what is listed in the players tab of EHM.

If you have someone who is a scratch or something, you can just send them down and note that they are your first call-up at that position.

Yeah, that's how EHM does it, and it's the reason why I haven't negotiated extensions yet - with the 30-and-under contract rule, I'd be cutting it VERY close to the cap if I started giving out extensions even though they technically shouldn't kick in next year. It's also a loophole that can be done with UFAs; sign them to a one-year, ridiculously high-salary contract to outbid everyone else, then immediately extend them to a normal contract and their cap hit is just the renegotiated salary. Of course, I think we have rules to stop that, but extensions for future RFA's are definitely harder to keep track of when there are thirty teams continuously re-signing their players.

Parker wrote:Will there be a penalty for a team that goes below the cap floor due to injured players?

Technically speaking, a team can go over the cap by the amount of the injured players salary. Assuming we use our $58M cap; if a team is at $57.5M, and a $3M center goes down, the team can go over the cap by $2.5M to $60.5. At least that's my understanding of the system. Regardless, the injured player's salary still counts, the team's cap just increases to reflect that.

What I'm getting at is even if you're at the league minimum, the injury won't drop your cap hit at all, so there shouldn't be anything to worry about.

Tuo-SabresGM wrote:

Parker wrote:Will there be a penalty for a team that goes below the cap floor due to injured players?

Technically speaking, a team can go over the cap by the amount of the injured players salary. Assuming we use our $58M cap; if a team is at $57.5M, and a $3M center goes down, the team can go over the cap by $2.5M to $60.5. At least that's my understanding of the system. Regardless, the injured player's salary still counts, the team's cap just increases to reflect that.

What I'm getting at is even if you're at the league minimum, the injury won't drop your cap hit at all, so there shouldn't be anything to worry about.

Exactly. Injuries will not cause you to go below the cap floor.

And yes, Tim, for the duration of AO's injury. The idea is that if a player makes that much money, it will probably take multiple players to replace that one guy's value to your team. Once he is activated, you will have to be under the cap again.

Commissioner (CBJ) wrote:Exactly. Injuries will not cause you to go below the cap floor.

And yes, Tim, for the duration of AO's injury. The idea is that if a player makes that much money, it will probably take multiple players to replace that one guy's value to your team. Once he is activated, you will have to be under the cap again.

Wanna lend me Gaborik for three weeks?

CapsGM wrote:

Commissioner (CBJ) wrote:Exactly. Injuries will not cause you to go below the cap floor.

And yes, Tim, for the duration of AO's injury. The idea is that if a player makes that much money, it will probably take multiple players to replace that one guy's value to your team. Once he is activated, you will have to be under the cap again.

Wanna lend me Gaborik for three weeks?

Wanna lend me Alzner and Semin for the next 6 years?

Commissioner (CBJ) wrote:

CapsGM wrote:

Commissioner (CBJ) wrote:Exactly. Injuries will not cause you to go below the cap floor.

And yes, Tim, for the duration of AO's injury. The idea is that if a player makes that much money, it will probably take multiple players to replace that one guy's value to your team. Once he is activated, you will have to be under the cap again.

Wanna lend me Gaborik for three weeks?

Wanna lend me Alzner and Semin for the next 6 years?

Yeah, the numbers reflect the amounts on the players tab in the game. I could go back and check everyone's extensions (or, easier for me, have all the GMs send me the extensions they've completed this season), but man that's a lot of work. Is that what we want, maybe starting next season? It can be done, I just wasn't expecting that to be part of the deal.

Originally, the lists did reflect injuries, in that I removed injured player salaries from each team's total. But rereading the EHEC cap rules, it says nothing about injuries taking you below the cap floor, so I put them back in. So in this case, WSH's number reflects that team's total salaries, including Ovechkin, putting him just below that cap and not at $67M.

I agree with Parker, in that we have no control over injuries (oh, but if we did... ), so that we shouldn't discount injured player's salaries from the cap. I don't think a GM should have to potentially put himself in cap ceiling jeopardy because of injuries. Now, it would take a massive amount of high-profile player injuries on one team to go from nearing the ceiling to dropping below the floor, but I suppose it could happen.

CapsGM wrote:

As I said, the injury exemption is in place for two reasons. One, to allow a team to replace injured players if they are close to the cap and two, to allow a team to use multiple players (if necessary) to fill the void left by the injured player.

What I was basically saying to Tim is that with Ovechkin's injury, he can choose to go over the cap by 8M or whatever OV makes, but he will have to be back down when AO is ready.

It may be a little bit questionable to have injuries count on the cap floor but not against the cap ceiling, but I think everyone understands why that is.

And Pat, no, we will not be going back to pre-extension contracts. It's far too much work and now that the issue has come to the forefront, teams will just have to be more cognizant of that.

With the Mark Bell and Josh Gorges signings, the Islanders are now above the cap floor. Also, with the demotion of Donovan, the Senators are under the cap.

SypherSens wrote:If that was the case, I probably would've waited until the end of the season to resign them.

Guess I can send down Donovan if everyone promises not to claim him lol.

Well the advantage of signing them during the season is you have all season to agree on a contract, plus, the sooner you offer to them, the less they will ask for.

You notice it the most with players who are progressing during the season. In the pre-season if you open up their profile they might ask for $1.8M or something, but as teh season goes on, by the end they might be asking for $3M.

Will the cap change at all next/each season, like the NHL cap does?

CapsGM wrote:Will the cap change at all next/each season, like the NHL cap does?

Highly highly unlikely.

The fact that we have not instituted a better contract rule for signing young players means that nobody should have cap problems. The mandatory raise rule will be revamped this offseason, but still within the constraints that a 58.5M cap should produce.

League Cap Figures (as of 3/12/10)

*injuries only included where a player's return will put a team over the cap

Anaheim -- 49,112,000
Atlanta -- 44,647,177
Boston -- 55,842,500
Buffalo -- 56,326,190
Calgary -- 52,480,333 (minus Phaneuf $6.25M)
Carolina -- 52,425,000
Chicago -- 52,686,208
Colorado -- 46,027,500
Columbus -- 56,975,694
Dallas -- 53,010,475
Detroit -- 52,037,322
Edmonton -- 55,047,500
Florida -- 43,761,666
Los Angeles -- 52,665,000
Minnesota -- 49,392,499
Montreal -- 43,878,000
NY Islanders -- 45,249,166
NY Rangers -- 54,800,833
Nashville -- 54,995,833
New Jersey -- 39,373,334
Ottawa -- 57,933,333
Philadelphia -- 54,556,012
Phoenix -- 46,315,000
Pittsburgh -- 54,915,000
San Jose -- 54,855,000
St. Louis -- 47,035,000
Tampa Bay -- 57,489,773 (minus Ranger $933,333K)
Toronto -- 51,800,534
Vancouver -- 57,715,000
Washington -- 56,801,796 (minus Clark $2.63M)