Whalers Fan
Go Habs!
The cap recapture penalty has to be the dumbest thing Bettman has been involved with.
- It punishes what was a legal trade at the time after the fact
- It makes a team pay for a player they no longer have under contract
- They could be forced to pay far more than what the player's salary currently is
- If the player retires later and closer to when he was supposed to, the team is punished more
- It is an overly complicated mess compared to the obvious solution of just putting in a rule from then on that contracts can't decline by that much, and saying c'est la vie to the to the Luongo type deals that got away with it
This is the point that I always thought completely defies logic with the recapture penalty. How does it make sense to punish a team more when the player comes closer to completing a contract you believe to be a salary cap circumvention? After all, the longer a player is active, the less obvious the salary cap circumvention.