Confirmed with Link: Sabres acquire G Ben Bishop and a 7th round pick in 2022 from Dallas in exchange for future considerations

[TehDoak]

Do you (or anyone) expect the Sabres to be a 'solid' playoff team next season ?

I mean, depends on how aggressive you want to be. I don't think the level of aggression required for us to compete for a playoff spot isn't good for where we are at developmentally. However, I do think you could address goaltending + 2 other major issues, along with the development of one of the youngster (Cozens, Quinn, Peterka, Krebs, etc), you could improve on last year quite a bit. Not sure it gets you to playoff level, but could get you above .500.

 

[joshjull]

1- They don’t have to immediately go to Rochester. They can be on the 23 man roster. If they’re not playing we can waive them. Those trades do happen, just not in the fashion you’re suggesting.

This is not a thing. Stop pretending it is.

2- To get a better pick than a 7th? If we want to “weaponize our cap space” we could get a better asset. Instead the Pegulas get to save cash. It happened with Marleau, it’s not unheard of

The trade was about adding Bishop’s cap hit not about shopping for a pick.

The Marleau trade situation is something thats pretty rare. The Canes took some risk hoping they could talk him into playing for them (he had to waive his NMC to allow the trade). It didn’t work out so they bought him out. They ended up paying 4.6mil for a first rounder but were hoping to add the player as well.

Bringing up the Marleau trade and many of the other things in your 10 point rant in a previous post is just throwing as much as you can against the wall to complain. Logic and context by damned. You want them to do everything and anything thats ever been done to utilize cap space all at once. Nevermind if it doesn’t make sense or if it rarely happens or if the various ideas contradict each other. You just want to be mad.

The Sabres are in a unique position by having so much cap space and having a ton of teams around them being the most cap-strapped we’ve seen since the cap existed. You can get creative and do anything possible (within reason) to put your franchise in the best position to succeed. Or you can be cheap and do next to nothing and do the absolute bare minimum just to reach the cap floor. Sounds like the latter is fine with you. It doesn’t sit well with me.

You're missing the unique position they’re in that matters most. Having an enormous amount of in house talent on the roster or NHL ready in the system. Add to that they are almost all on ELCs or inexpensive bridge deals. We have a LOT of inexpensive talent. Its why our cap situation will be as close to the lower limit as it will be. Their focus is on building from within and not blocking youth. Its going to be another year of growth and development for individual players and the team as a whole. They’ve said this repeatedly.

Thats the prism you need to view the offseason through. You don’t have to agree with the approach but you need to understand it if you're going to better understand why they make the moves they will make this offseason.

Just take the Evolving Wild contract estimates you posted for Olofsson/Bryson/R2/UPL and add them to our existing signed roster players and likely roster players (Quinn/Peterka’s/Fitzgerald). Then add in Bishops cap hit.

Its only about 57 mil in cap hits that includes

14 forwards
6 dmen
1 goalie
and Bishops cap hit.

In that context this trade makes perfect sense.

 

[joshjull]

The league cares cap circumvention because they don't want 90's style spiraling payroll costs. When they locked out the players it was to force a cap down their throats, not increase parity.

We should expect an NHL clamp down on LTIR payroll during the regular season long before they'll address retirement contracts potentially qualifying the floor. Although I don't think they'll address that issue anytime soon. It allows a sort of high risk soft cap for certain rich teams.

Game management appears to be their one stop shopping for parity.

There was some talk about having LTIR carry through into the playoffs in some form. One proposal was it applied only to the players playing on a given night. So there would still be wiggle room but not wide open like it is now.

 

[SnuggaRUDE]

There was some talk about having LTIR carry through into the playoffs in some form. One proposal was it applied only to the players playing on a given night. So there would still be wiggle room but not wide open like it is now.

I had not heard that, was that from internal to the NHL? Or a faction of the BoG?

 

[Jim Bob]

There was some talk about having LTIR carry through into the playoffs in some form. One proposal was it applied only to the players playing on a given night. So there would still be wiggle room but not wide open like it is now.

And it didn't go anywhere because it would require the NHLPA to sign off on it as it would be a change to the CBA. And the owners did not want to give up anything to the NHLPA for it.

I think this is a relatively minor thing that might get brought up during the next round of CBA talks. But, I doubt it is a huge issue that the owners ever make a concession to change.

Kind of like the draft rights expiring for players that go the college hockey route.

I had not heard that, was that from internal to the NHL? Or a faction of the BoG?

Takeaways from the NHL GM meetings: LTIR 'loophole' staying, World Cup of Hockey returning

Here's who benefits the most from the status quo remaining intact. Plus, intel on the next World Cup, next season's salary cap and more.

www.espn.com

It was brought up at the GM meetings.

 

[SnuggaRUDE]

Takeaways from the NHL GM meetings: LTIR 'loophole' staying, World Cup of Hockey returning

Here's who benefits the most from the status quo remaining intact. Plus, intel on the next World Cup, next season's salary cap and more.

www.espn.com

It was brought up at the GM meetings.

Thanks muchly

 

[Jim Bob]

Thanks muchly

No problem.

And here was Bettman's response to the GMs talking about it.

LeBrun: NHL GMs agree to continue LTIR/playoff salary-cap talks

Recent issues in the NHL involving LTIR, a playoff salary cap, and no-trade lists were part of the discussion at the GMs meetings.

theathletic.com

From a league perspective, commissioner Gary Bettman clearly doesn’t think this is a front-burner issue. But he’s also allowing for the discussion on it to continue.

Which includes discussing it with the NHL Players’ Association.

“Any change to the CBA obviously requires the approval of the Players’ Association,” Bettman said. “It was a good discussion because I believe overwhelmingly the view of the managers is one, this hasn’t been a problem for the last 17 years, this isn’t new. It’s more perceptional, nobody thinks it’s been abused. There are always adjustments that people would like to make to the collective bargaining agreement.

“This is something that would be nice to adjust, to change the perception, but I don’t think it’s been viewed as being a problem. Because it hasn’t (been).”

Added Bettman: “And overall, if you look at the system and how it’s held up over the last 17 years, despite the fact that agents and managers will sometimes try to get creative, the fact is the system works well. And there’s always little tweaks that you’d like to focus on. But none have risen to the level of, ‘Oh my word, that’s terrible abuse.’ That’s not reached that level.”

Having said that, Bettman left the door open for potentially tweaking things depending on how the NHLPA feels about it. The commissioner was asked if there’s any appetite for a salary cap in the playoffs:

“Well, as I said, we talk to the Players’ Association about the operation of the system on a regular basis,” Bettman responded. “You know, in some ideal world, maybe that would be a good change. But as (deputy commissioner) Bill (Daly) said, the roster situation is different in the playoffs (rosters expand). But it’s not anything that’s going to get addressed as a front-burner issue anytime soon.”

 

[threeVo]

This is not a thing. Stop pretending it is.

The trade was about adding Bishop’s cap hit not about shopping for a pick.

The Marleau trade situation is something thats pretty rare. The Canes took some risk hoping they could talk him into playing for them (he had to waive his NMC to allow the trade). It didn’t work out so they bought him out. They ended up paying 4.6mil for a first rounder but were hoping to add the player as well.

Bringing up the Marleau trade and many of the other things in your 10 point rant in a previous post is just throwing as much as you can against the wall to complain. Logic and context by damned. You want them to do everything and anything thats ever been done to utilize cap space all at once. Nevermind if it doesn’t make sense or if it rarely happens or if the various ideas contradict each other. You just want to be mad.

Well they need something to complain about until we draft the players that are not going to work out. Just like Jack Quinn when we picked him

 

[RefsIdeas]

This is not a thing. Stop pretending it is.

I mean, it's happened. I'm not saying it's something that happens all the time but it's not unheard of.

The trade was about adding Bishop’s cap hit not about shopping for a pick.

The Marleau trade situation is something thats pretty rare. The Canes took some risk hoping they could talk him into playing for them (he had to waive his NMC to allow the trade). It didn’t work out so they bought him out. They ended up paying 4.6mil for a first rounder but were hoping to add the player as well.

Bringing up the Marleau trade and many of the other things in your 10 point rant in a previous post is just throwing as much as you can against the wall to complain. Logic and context by damned. You want them to do everything and anything thats ever been done to utilize cap space all at once. Nevermind if it doesn’t make sense or if it rarely happens or if the various ideas contradict each other. You just want to be mad.

While I agree the Marleau trade is rare, I think if there was a year we would see other "rare" trades made - this would be it.

My 11 point "rant" was just a series responding to various arguments I saw people bring up in support of the trade. It wasn't a Shapiro-esque style of argument trying to throw a bunch of nonsense at the wall. I was just reading through the thread and thought "wow I don't really agree with any of these" and instead of responding to 11 different people I just made it into one post. I don't want to be mad at all. At it's core I think you and I both want the Sabres to make the best moves to set our franchise up for success.

You're missing the unique position they’re in that matters most. Having an enormous amount of in house talent on the roster or NHL ready in the system. Add to that they are almost all on ELCs or inexpensive bridge deals. We have a LOT of inexpensive talent. Its why our cap situation will be as close to the lower limit as it will be. Their focus is on building from within and not blocking youth. Its going to be another year of growth and development for individual players and the team as a whole. They’ve said this repeatedly.

Thats the prism you need to view the offseason through. You don’t have to agree with the approach but you need to understand it if you're going to better understand why they make the moves they will make this offseason.

Just take the Evolving Wild contract estimates you posted for Olofsson/Bryson/R2/UPL and add them to our existing signed roster players and likely roster players (Quinn/Peterka’s/Fitzgerald). Then add in Bishops cap hit.

Its only about 57 mil in cap hits that includes

14 forwards
6 dmen
1 goalie
and Bishops cap hit.

In that context this trade makes perfect sense.

I don't think I'm missing the unique position at all. Here's what I think we can agree on:

- The Sabres have a ton of cap space and not many positions to fill
- We want to be patient and let the young guys develop
- We don't want to rush a rebuild Tim Murray style
- We want to be mindful of the culture we have here and not disrupt it
- We don't want to overpay any UFA's and just to use the cap space just for the sake of using it

I think the things we disagree on are:

- I want the Sabres to use the cap space to it's fullest advantage, while being mindful of short and long-term impacts and trying to acquire as many assets as possible to use the cap space to our advantage in a very cap-strapped year.

- I want the Sabres to try and use this off-season to aggressively fill one or two future holes (RHD, Goalie, Perhaps 1C, Veteran physical presence etc) and not just acquire one-year low salary band-aids that don't really do much for the short or long-term (bringing in guys like DeSmith, Ethan Bear, Stecher is what I'm referring to).

- It's wholly unacceptable to go into 2022 without aggressively trying to acquire a real starting goalie. Levi/Portillo/UPL can earn their starting spot. If they don't want to sign because we trade for somebody - then that's not a very good indication of the kind of player they are.

Here's the thing - I don't really care how they do it. Acting as a third-party to retain salary on a trade? Sure! Trading for a cap dump? Go for it. Buying out a player? If it's one year left - I'm all aboard. Trading for a guy with one year left as an experiment (ie Dumba) and trading him at the TDL if it doesn't work out? Great! Doing next to nothing and acquiring Bishop's contract just to artificially reach the cap floor? Yeesh, that doesn't sound very appealing to me. It's puzzling to me how year after year other teams can acquire solid assets for taking on cap dumps - but for some reason we think the Sabres can't? I truly do understand we don't have a lot of room amongst our forwards, but we don't have to kick anybody out. I do think there's an argument to be made for creating competition amongst the forwards and not just "handing" the young guys roster spots, but I could probably go either way depending on who the player we acquire is.

 

[dotcommunism]

Teams spending less than the mid-point doesn't affect total player compensation. The players' share is fixed as 50% of league revenue (with consideration that the economics are a bit wonky right now still due to the lingering revenue effects of Covid). If anything, considering how much the players apparently hate escrow, they should be in favor of teams spending only at the cap floor, as that would help offset the significant amount of teams that spend at or above the ceiling, and reduce escrow payments.