The Dadonov debacle is not yet sorted out at this moment, but it once again is shining a light on the joke that the NHL salary cap has become. Tampa wrote the script for teams to go over the cap; find a player on your team whose salary is sufficient to solve the problem, and put them on LTIR.
It's rare to find an NHL player who's been at it for a while who doesn't have some sort of chronic or nagging injury. Players ignore the pain and play anyways, and surgeries often wait for the off-season. A doctor can verify that a player is "injured", even if that injury hasn't gotten any worse than it's been during the last 40 games the player has managed to suit up.
In the most recent fiasco, Evgenii Dadanov was traded from Vegas to Anaheim, but apparently had Anaheim on his no-trade list, but Vegas never received that months ago when they took Dadanov in a trade with Ottawa. The crux of the debate seems to be whether the fault for this lies with Vegas, Ottawa, Dadanov's agent, or some combination of all of them. Apparently public cap websites included the no-trade info, but none of the teams involved in this most recent screw-up did the due diligence of finding that out.
Why is it such a big deal? Vegas is over the cap--by a lot. They sidelined Mark Stone to make Eichel's contract fit, no doubt planning his miracle recovery to coincide with the opening game of the playoffs. It worked for Tampa, but Stone was evidently more important to the Golden Knights' success than they realized. They've pretty much been in free fall since parking Stone, and now the playoffs aren't a certainty.
Cue the trade--get some cap flexibility, by taking on the actually injured Ryan Kesler's contract and accompanying LTIR, and Stone can be re-activated. But the chaos of this no-trade fiasco now may mean that can't happen.
What this mess really shows is how stupid the current cap system is. The cap is supposed to keep teams operating on a fairly equal level, avoiding the the inequity of Major League Baseball, where the New York Yankees have traditionally just opened the vault to acquire any and all good free agents when they're available. This season, the NY Mets' salary total is $236 million, while Cleveland's payroll for 2022 is about $29.1 million--less than one-eighth the total of the Mets number.
English Premier League soccer is similar in the disparity between the have and the have-not clubs. In 2016 Leicester City won the Premiership, but it was against 5000-1 odds, and the vast majority of times the championships are won by teams with the highest payrolls.
So the NHL needs to keep the cap, right? No need to go back to the years that the Detroit Red Wings could keep icing top-calibre squads with a far higher payroll than most teams could manage, after all. But maybe it's not that simple. Some teams in the pre-cap era, like the NY Rangers, spent exorbitantly yet still managed to embrace mediocrity year after year.
The simple fact is that the current salary cap doesn't work. Poor teams trade injured players to rich teams to give them the cap space relief, much in the same way that poor nations trade carbon credits to rich nations to allow those nations to continue spewing pollution into the atmosphere. The league keeps things fair by pretending the cap is meaningful, and making the wealthier teams share revenue with the organizations that would surely fold without the help.
This makes idiocy like planning to play Arizona Coyotes games in a tiny arena with fewer than 5000 seats possible for the next few years. After all, the league will make up the difference, and the overall reduction in league revenue can be subsidized by dipping into the players' wallets through the escrow system.
It's time to change this. If there was no league welfare system, Arizona would have been forced to solve their arena issue years ago or move the team to a more workable situation. They run a pathetic franchise that trades away anyone who might make a decent salary, and they sell off their long-term injured players to help make the dysfunction work.
If a luxury-tax system was used, instead of a hard cap, the money paid by teams to go over the cap could be used to help prop up these no-budget franchises just as they are now, and the open joke that is LTIR cap relief could be avoided. Sure, rich teams will have an advantage, but they do now--they're all now jumping into the convenient injury party, and it's only going to get worse moving forward.
"If you're not cheating you're not trying."--Somehow everyone seems fine with the LTIR loophole, or at least those in charge aren't doing anything about it. Canucks fans gag as they see this hypocrisy while for years their team was penalized 3 million per season because they signed Roberto Luongo to what was a completely legal contract at the time. Yes it was a loophole, but it was still allowed then.
Trade deadline day used to be exciting; now it's a constipated shell of its former glory. Admittedly, allowing Toronto to run rampant with a cheque book will probably annoy most of us, but I don't think it could be worse than what the current system has devolved to, and players would probably welcome getting out from under the burden of escrow to help prop up joke franchises that want to play in peewee arenas.
#NHL #Salarycap #Coyotes #Dadanov
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