BoredBrandonPridham
Registered User
- Aug 9, 2011
- 7,573
- 4,061
I was thinking about how a lot of our cap outlook comprises of us looking at a 22-man rosters against a $81.5m salary cap. But as we know, cap space accumulates daily and you can accrue a balance early to spend over the AAV limit later. I don't think we fully internalize the scale of impact this can have, and we've seen the Leafs exploit it with Trevor Moore. Last season, Leafs used Moore's waiver exemption to bring him onto the NHL roster on game days, and demote him on the off-days, thus saving his daily cap accruals on the off-days.
I'm going to just skip the whole off-season and take that technique one step further to an off-day 20-man roster to see how we can use that to try and ice the most competitive play-off team (if all went to plan) while taking a performance hit earlier in the season, and what overall impact that could have on TDL day for us.
First, let's knock out a couple common cap fallacies that we cannot try and exploit:
1. You cannot accrue if you're using LTIR. I am not going to put Horton on LTIR until the TDL.
2. You gain nothing by letting Mitch sit for part of the season only to sign him later. In-year cap inflation will cancel out this effect (see Nylander year1 cap v.s. 2+ / out-year)
Second, let's make a couple of assumptions and solidify that this is obviously a hypothetical estimate:
1. I'm going to reasonably ignore the unsubstantiated rumour about Mitch "turning down" $11mx8. I'm going to equate that speculation with the speculation of Nylander holding out for $8m+ and that gets us Mitch at around $9.8mx5. If you want to bump a couple hundred K it doesn't impact this analysis all that much.
2. Obviously, this plan does not take into consideration injuries which can derail things, additionally with the looming fact that one or both of Dermott and Hyman may be eating cap early. I haven't really seen many people discussing AAV cap hits considering that, so for this exercise I won't either
3. We've traded Brown & Zaitsev for not much of any consequence (I think we can realistically do a bit better than that, though...)
4. Assume I've made a couple off-by-1 errors on the days and accrual and stuff below, sorry about that! I hope the overall concept and structure is close, though.
The point of this is to just gauge the scale of this technique in a vacuum to see if Leafs really have any flexibility to get creative with the cap and roster, and to be honest I think there's a bit more flexibility here throughout the season that we give credit for.
I've split the season into 3 chapters where team performance will be re-evaluated:
Extended Try Out (Oct 2 - Nov 1)
Finally give a proper look to our cheap press box fodder: Holl & Petan. For all of October, these guys play every game. Rather than keep them sitting in the press box every day accumulating wasted cap, we put them on the ice and potential ELC replacements play/train on the Marlies for October. Leafs ice a 20 man roster.
Set the team (Nov 1 - Dec 22)
After extended try outs we've decided who will be playing somewhat regularly, and who will be on hold in the press box to step in in case of injury. During this time we will have a 20 man off-day roster and a 22-man game day roster. Our 22-man game day roster has ~$1.8m coming up from the Marlies to accrue a day of cap, then they go back down. Note our 22-man game day roster puts us over $1.8m, but we accrue that allowance in Oct.
At this point we revisit how disastrous this team has performed. If making playoffs is really at risk, let's execute some explored trade options before the holiday trade freeze and put Horton on LTIR ("Plan B"). This cap exercise assumes we'll stick to Plan A, though.
TDL stretch (Dec 22 - Feb 24 TDL)
We continue our off-day/game-day roster switch accruing as much cap as possible. At this point, we execute 3 transactions:
a) One set of transactions in which we'll acquire up to ~$4.7m to push us right up to the cap daily limit. We need to do this to maximize our LTIR benefit
b) Finally assign Horton on LTIR, allowing us to exceed by his daily accrual
c) Execute another trade in which we'll acquire up to $5.3m to fill Horton's space
A total of $10m AAV acquired at the deadline to shore up the defense and unarguably guarantee us a cup win, right?
Ok, here's the numbers.
2019-20 daily cap accrual: $81.5m / 186 days = $438,172 per day
I present to your our opening day, stinktastic 20-man roster, which is $1,409,468 under the cap (-$7,577 per day), and I have not put Horton on LTIR:
This is the estimated off-day roster (also the try-out roster that will play all of October). Good opportunity here for Marlies who have done a lot for the organization. They deserve a good look, just like Sparks did.
As mentioned, after October, we will be calling up ~$1.8m of replacements on game days. That's like Mikheyev (sorry dude) and some just-under $900k AAV Marlies flavour of the week. I had put that team cap hit around $81,808,032 ($300k over the cap). We can't ice this game day 22-man roster until we've completed our October try-outs and accrued the additional cap space to ice it.
So lets look at how these rosters accrue daily cap throughout the seasons in our evaluation segments:
October 2, 2019 (Day 1)
=================
Accrued upper limit: $438,172
Leafs off-day and opening roster: $80,090,532 (-$1,409,468): Daily: $430,594
Leafs game-day roster: $81,808,032 (+$308,032): Daily: $439,828
November 1, 2019 (Days: 30, held the $430,594 roster every day)
=====================
Accrued upper limit: $12,706,988 (since opening day)
Spent cap: $12,487,226 (-$219,762) (since opening day)
New daily limit: (81,500,000 - 12,487,226) / (186 - 30) = $442,389 (now enough space for our game-day roster)
Dec 21, 2019 (Days: 51; Off-days: 28; Game-days: 23)
======================================
Accrued upper limit: $22,346,774 (since Nov 1)
Spent cap: $22,172,676 (-$174,098) (since Nov 1)
New daily limit: (81,500,000 - 34,659,902) / (186 - 81) = $446,096 ($1,473,856 AAV)
Feb 24, 2020 (Days: 65; Off-days: 39; Game-days: 26)
=======================================
Accrued upper limit: $28,481,182 (since Dec 21)
Spent cap: $28,228,694 (-$252,488) (since Dec 21)
New daily limit: (81,500,000 - 62,888,596) / (186 - 146) = $465,285 ($5,043,010 AAV)
As we approach the trade deadline, Leafs have options for these transactions in roughly this order:
1. Recall game day roster from Marlies, roster daily spend now at: $439,828
2. Acquire a net +$4,735,002 AAV ($25,457 daily), roster daily spend: $465,285 (at the Feb 24 limit)
3. Place Horton on LTIR, allowed to exceed daily limit by $28,494 ($5,299,884 AAV player)
4. Acquire another net +$5,300,000 AAV in transactions to fill our Horton overage
Thus, we:
a) Made full use of time available, maximizing our assets
b) Gave our developing prospects a good look to keep that FA/Marlies "you'll get your chance" karma flowing
c) Didn't make knee-jerk, short-sighted, regrettable decisions, trading high potential players that are the core of this team such as Nylander and Marner
d) Accrued flexibility, while establishing checkpoints to "bail out" of Plan A if things were going way, way south. Best case scenario, Matthews 100% healthy, Nylander now 100% of season, our prospects excelled and we could fulfill the whole plan. Worst case, we accrue a bit of extra cap space, LTIR Horton around Christmas and make a transaction for a maybe ~$2.5m Zaitsev replacement which is higher than we would have had if we made that transaction before the season
e) Accrued serious cap space to help us in the playoffs
I'm going to just skip the whole off-season and take that technique one step further to an off-day 20-man roster to see how we can use that to try and ice the most competitive play-off team (if all went to plan) while taking a performance hit earlier in the season, and what overall impact that could have on TDL day for us.
First, let's knock out a couple common cap fallacies that we cannot try and exploit:
1. You cannot accrue if you're using LTIR. I am not going to put Horton on LTIR until the TDL.
2. You gain nothing by letting Mitch sit for part of the season only to sign him later. In-year cap inflation will cancel out this effect (see Nylander year1 cap v.s. 2+ / out-year)
Second, let's make a couple of assumptions and solidify that this is obviously a hypothetical estimate:
1. I'm going to reasonably ignore the unsubstantiated rumour about Mitch "turning down" $11mx8. I'm going to equate that speculation with the speculation of Nylander holding out for $8m+ and that gets us Mitch at around $9.8mx5. If you want to bump a couple hundred K it doesn't impact this analysis all that much.
2. Obviously, this plan does not take into consideration injuries which can derail things, additionally with the looming fact that one or both of Dermott and Hyman may be eating cap early. I haven't really seen many people discussing AAV cap hits considering that, so for this exercise I won't either
3. We've traded Brown & Zaitsev for not much of any consequence (I think we can realistically do a bit better than that, though...)
4. Assume I've made a couple off-by-1 errors on the days and accrual and stuff below, sorry about that! I hope the overall concept and structure is close, though.
The point of this is to just gauge the scale of this technique in a vacuum to see if Leafs really have any flexibility to get creative with the cap and roster, and to be honest I think there's a bit more flexibility here throughout the season that we give credit for.
I've split the season into 3 chapters where team performance will be re-evaluated:
Extended Try Out (Oct 2 - Nov 1)
Finally give a proper look to our cheap press box fodder: Holl & Petan. For all of October, these guys play every game. Rather than keep them sitting in the press box every day accumulating wasted cap, we put them on the ice and potential ELC replacements play/train on the Marlies for October. Leafs ice a 20 man roster.
Set the team (Nov 1 - Dec 22)
After extended try outs we've decided who will be playing somewhat regularly, and who will be on hold in the press box to step in in case of injury. During this time we will have a 20 man off-day roster and a 22-man game day roster. Our 22-man game day roster has ~$1.8m coming up from the Marlies to accrue a day of cap, then they go back down. Note our 22-man game day roster puts us over $1.8m, but we accrue that allowance in Oct.
At this point we revisit how disastrous this team has performed. If making playoffs is really at risk, let's execute some explored trade options before the holiday trade freeze and put Horton on LTIR ("Plan B"). This cap exercise assumes we'll stick to Plan A, though.
TDL stretch (Dec 22 - Feb 24 TDL)
We continue our off-day/game-day roster switch accruing as much cap as possible. At this point, we execute 3 transactions:
a) One set of transactions in which we'll acquire up to ~$4.7m to push us right up to the cap daily limit. We need to do this to maximize our LTIR benefit
b) Finally assign Horton on LTIR, allowing us to exceed by his daily accrual
c) Execute another trade in which we'll acquire up to $5.3m to fill Horton's space
A total of $10m AAV acquired at the deadline to shore up the defense and unarguably guarantee us a cup win, right?
Ok, here's the numbers.
2019-20 daily cap accrual: $81.5m / 186 days = $438,172 per day
I present to your our opening day, stinktastic 20-man roster, which is $1,409,468 under the cap (-$7,577 per day), and I have not put Horton on LTIR:
This is the estimated off-day roster (also the try-out roster that will play all of October). Good opportunity here for Marlies who have done a lot for the organization. They deserve a good look, just like Sparks did.
As mentioned, after October, we will be calling up ~$1.8m of replacements on game days. That's like Mikheyev (sorry dude) and some just-under $900k AAV Marlies flavour of the week. I had put that team cap hit around $81,808,032 ($300k over the cap). We can't ice this game day 22-man roster until we've completed our October try-outs and accrued the additional cap space to ice it.
So lets look at how these rosters accrue daily cap throughout the seasons in our evaluation segments:
October 2, 2019 (Day 1)
=================
Accrued upper limit: $438,172
Leafs off-day and opening roster: $80,090,532 (-$1,409,468): Daily: $430,594
Leafs game-day roster: $81,808,032 (+$308,032): Daily: $439,828
November 1, 2019 (Days: 30, held the $430,594 roster every day)
=====================
Accrued upper limit: $12,706,988 (since opening day)
Spent cap: $12,487,226 (-$219,762) (since opening day)
New daily limit: (81,500,000 - 12,487,226) / (186 - 30) = $442,389 (now enough space for our game-day roster)
Dec 21, 2019 (Days: 51; Off-days: 28; Game-days: 23)
======================================
Accrued upper limit: $22,346,774 (since Nov 1)
Spent cap: $22,172,676 (-$174,098) (since Nov 1)
New daily limit: (81,500,000 - 34,659,902) / (186 - 81) = $446,096 ($1,473,856 AAV)
Feb 24, 2020 (Days: 65; Off-days: 39; Game-days: 26)
=======================================
Accrued upper limit: $28,481,182 (since Dec 21)
Spent cap: $28,228,694 (-$252,488) (since Dec 21)
New daily limit: (81,500,000 - 62,888,596) / (186 - 146) = $465,285 ($5,043,010 AAV)
As we approach the trade deadline, Leafs have options for these transactions in roughly this order:
1. Recall game day roster from Marlies, roster daily spend now at: $439,828
2. Acquire a net +$4,735,002 AAV ($25,457 daily), roster daily spend: $465,285 (at the Feb 24 limit)
3. Place Horton on LTIR, allowed to exceed daily limit by $28,494 ($5,299,884 AAV player)
4. Acquire another net +$5,300,000 AAV in transactions to fill our Horton overage
Thus, we:
a) Made full use of time available, maximizing our assets
b) Gave our developing prospects a good look to keep that FA/Marlies "you'll get your chance" karma flowing
c) Didn't make knee-jerk, short-sighted, regrettable decisions, trading high potential players that are the core of this team such as Nylander and Marner
d) Accrued flexibility, while establishing checkpoints to "bail out" of Plan A if things were going way, way south. Best case scenario, Matthews 100% healthy, Nylander now 100% of season, our prospects excelled and we could fulfill the whole plan. Worst case, we accrue a bit of extra cap space, LTIR Horton around Christmas and make a transaction for a maybe ~$2.5m Zaitsev replacement which is higher than we would have had if we made that transaction before the season
e) Accrued serious cap space to help us in the playoffs