As someone who has now had waaaay too many surgical procedures on my back and yet still have constant agony 24/7/365, I sincerely wish him nothing but success with the surgeries and I genuinely hope that they are successful and he can be pain free moving forward, whether that means he can return to competitive hockey or if it just means being able to lead a normal life outside the game. Chronic pain is no joke. I wish him nothing but the best.
LTIR is one of those highly misunderstood concepts in the CBA. I see sooooo much misinformation or conflicting information about how to apply the rules, I never know for sure what to believe. Its hard to figure out what is right, what is wrong, what is someone's incorrect guess, what is just lack of understanding or misleading etc...
I **assume** if we are going for in season LTIr to get maximum flexibility then we need to have Gards count as an u hurt player and have his full contract be on the books for the first day of the season. So we want to be as close as humanly possible to the salary cap without going over the cap on day 1 using Gards contract. Then on day 1, if we move Gards to LTIR, we get to take his full contract value off the books and we can replace the entire dollar amount of the contract.... in this way we can "go over" the cap by the amount of his contract.
Its not that we are going over the cap and actually spending more than $81.5m on players that are playing on the active roster. We are just going to be able to eliminate any cap cost of Gards salary and still be able to spend up to the full 81.5 million on our roster of players besides Gards.
Right now, if we don't move stuff around and we just count everyone as is on the roster, we would have to do out of season LTIR to be cap compliant on day 1 of the regular season,, which leaves us in a bad spot....Counting Gardiner, we currently have:
2 goalies counting for $6.5m
8 Dmen counting for $25,325,000
13 forwards counting for $51,198,628.
For a grand total of $83,023,628, which is $1,523,628 over the cap. If we go into the season as is, we have $0 in cap space and didn't maximize the "benefit" of putting Gards on LTIR..
We get to wipe away Gards contract from our cap in this scenario, but that means we have zero cap space left and have to demote someone to the AHL and not have them on the roster each day of the regular season to start "banking cap space" since the cap is calculated daily to determine trade deadline cap space and get higher than $0 in overall cap space.
What we want to do instead is temporarily demote someone else (or multiple people in whatever combination works ideally best) on our roster who is waivers eligible so on day 1 of the season their contract doesn't count towards our cap total..... or waive someone else on our roster who isn't waivers eligible and hope we can sneak them past getting claimed on waivers so that we can keep the Gardiner contract actively on the books on day 1 and have our total cap hit of all the contracts on day 1 be as close to $81,500,000 as possible. Then, when we put Gards on LTIR on day 1, it is LTIR in season, we can exceed the cap by Gards salary minus the difference between 81.5m and our total cap hit on that day 1 when Gards was active before being put on LTIR.
So, for example, if we move stuff around and our cap hit is $81,000,000 on day 1 including Gards $4.05m cap hit contract pre LTIR. When we put Gards on LTIr we then have $4,050,000 - $500,000 (the difference between $81.5m cap and our total cap hit on that day of $81m) = $3,050,000 in cap space instead of $0.
We can then recall the players we were hiding in the minors and we are left with cap space equal to the $3.05m minus their cap hits....
Have I got that right?
So, we are $1,523,628 over the cap when you include everyone on the roster currently signed and expected to be here... we have to find a single waivers eligible player or a combo of players we can waive and hope won't get claimed to get us as close to that 1.5m number and this have us as tight to the cap as possible temporarily on day 1. Necas is the only waivers eligible player on the current roster and his cap hit on the books before bonuses is too low at $863,333. We still need another $660,295 in contract value hidden to make this work.. We need a second player to be put on waivers and pass through....one of Lorentz, Smith, or Leivo have to he exposed and then we can "recall" them on paper after we process Gards onto LTIR.. I would think we don't expose Lorentz and do it to Smith or Leivo?
Either of those 3 are within 100k of one another and gets us as close to maximum ltir benefit should we want to make additional moves later on and don't expect Gards back this season or expect him back much later in the year and want to be able to handle his cap hit without having to force players to be waived to fit him.
Should be interesting how they do this. The front office and cap management people likely know these scenarios and plan to go this route as opposed to just letting it ride as is and leave us with $0 in cap space for call ups or other moves we might want to make through the year..
