The one thing about Richard's contract, is it is one of the older back diving contracts. After next season his actual salary starts dropping below his cap hit. Those can be appealing to teams trying to get to the cap floor and pay out lower salaries. Still IMO a fair amount of risk to take on his contract.
Who are those mythical teams trying to get to the cap floor, and willing to take on atrocious contracts, that I keep reading about? I last read about them during the Pavelec mega-thread
Richards' cap hit is $5.75 million
His salary is...
- 2015-16 $6 million
- 2016-17 $5.5 million
- 2017-18 $4.5 million
- 2018-19 $3 million
- 2019-20 $3 million
A team would have to keep him for at least 3 seasons to see any benefit if they pick him up this off-season. And if you're trying to cut costs, do you really want to take on his salary for the first couple of seasons?
Looking at the committed 2015-2016 payrolls on Capgeek at
http://capgeek.com/payrolls?charts_year=2015 Buffalo is the worst case, having committed only $35,892,500 cap hit for 13 players. Let's assume the cap goes up to $70 million. The floor will be $16 million lower, i.e. $54 million. That forces them to spend at least an additional $18,107,500. Since a roster can be up to 23 players, that leaves 10 additional positions, i.e. just over $1.8 million per player. I'm sure there will be a lot of competent UFAs available at $2 or $3 million per year willing to take 1 or 2 year contracts.
