PREDS NIED FOR SPEED TRADING
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To VGK: Nino Niederreiter + NYI 2nd 2020
To NSH: Mattias Ekholm
The legality of this trade was talked about over the Discord channel so I feel the need to clarify my position on this. The NHL restricts teams from trading a player and retaining a portion of their contract, and then re-acquiring that player in less than a year's time. Nashville originally dealt Ekholm earlier this season so by NHL rules, this trade should be invalid.
There is no rule prohibiting this in the HFVHL rulebook so we're in a bit of a grey area here. I generally defer to the NHL's rules in situations where something is missed in our rulebook, but I'm leaning towards letting this one slide.
Our league's retention rules were relaxed a little compared to the NHL's to make things less complicated. I did this as well with a number of other rules (offer sheets, RFA rights, etc.) for the same reason. I remember leaving out one rule in particular that restricts teams from having more than 15% of their cap tied up in salary retention as I felt this would needlessly complicate things.
tl;dr: I don't think it's fair for me to pick and choose which NHL rules should apply to salary retention and which shouldn't, at least in these "grey area" situations. If I purposely left out some rules related to retention in our CBA, I can't really justify sticking to another NHL rule that was left out. The trade stands -- but I appreciate Dabeast and others for noticing this rule in the first place.