Straw man. At no point did I ever claim that Kucherov wasn't injured or that this isn't the usual recovery time for that surgery. The same applies to the situation with Kane and with the Pens when they did it at the trade deadline. I do think TB opted to go this route specifically to avoid dealing with their cap issues for another year, which is what makes the whole thing feel a bit shadier than the previous two.
My point is that--regardless of the injury--teams should be on equal financial footing in the post-season. Chicago effectively played the post-season that year with an extra 5 million dollars of cap space relative to every other team. TB's "bonus cap" will be even larger this season. The only solution is to keep the cap in place for the playoffs by having teams submit a cap-compliant active roster for each round. Under that fix, you could still replace players that get injured, but when those players come back, you don't get to keep them AND their replacements. Not one TB fan has given me a valid reason why that rule shouldn't happen.
How is it shady? It’s literally what the rule is for? If you have a guy legitimately injured who will need surgery, yea, you might as well get it.
It’s convenient timing sure, sometimes things are just convenient. Like, when your opponent entering the first round happens to lose a star or two to injury after the deadline which often happens. Now you’re potentially icing tens of millions more dollars then they are.
There’s a huge degree of luck involved, good or bad, for every team every year involving injuries to themselves or the other team.
Unless you
do think they’re lying about the injury, then what do you think about those situations? Because from a competition roster-vs-roster situation it’s essentially identical, the timing cross section of Kucherov, RFAs and Covid (and the fact this happened to a team that just happened to be deep; this would be irrelevant on a worse managed team) just worked out compared to the timing of your matchup and this teams loss; good for you building better depth. The degree of luck here being so big is why you hardly ever see this, there’s no way this could have been even a medium term plan without some ability to force covid. They’ve gotten the chance to kick the can a year.
LTIR is about 90-100% of most of the leagues regular season. Icing as competitive a roster as possible with the same allowance as long as possible (the entire regular season it has to fit) to even make the playoffs, compete for home ice (and just generally be more entertaining, more player movement not to mention the benefit to players themselves who often get traded off crap teams to compete in the playoffs from these situations.) That is equal financial footing, at least in most eyes around the league.
theres no clean solution to this “problem” that doesn’t just create other, more likely/frequent issues for more teams.
—————
———————-
——————————
Also, I think my prior posts made noteworthy points you’re conveniently bypassing claiming “straw man” when they’ve directly responded to things you’ve said. You say this isn’t about legality, okay fine, so what is it?
you mention general fairness, abuse of rules, blah blah, I give multiple factors explaining how this situation is perfectly reasonable, if imperfect, and why you’re almost certainly in the minority opinion, why the league more than likely doesn’t find this some abuse.
The injury was real, the choices both the team AND player had respective to what one could reasonably assume they’d desire;
you’ve anticipated and or argued that the league should or will change this;
I’ve countered with reasons the league wouldn’t want to,
problems your solution would create,
and as best I can how all teams understand the exceptional conditions and possibly figure, okay, they’ve got some cap problems with their backs against the wall.. and their players genuinely injured, short season; lucky them catching a break instead of getting completely f***ed asset-wise in trades.