aziz

agreed. this wasn't a trade anyone "won". san jose gets a guy they can rely on to give them fairly safe minutes when needed, and the flyers remove one contract from their reserve list and pick up a 10% chance of drafting an extra NHL player next year. isn't really win/win, but definitely isn't lose/lose.

@Mad Dog and, worst comes to worst, he is a safe call up. won't hurt you.

@pilldoc well, they did get very yesterday. downie is supposed to answer that, i guess.

i still think it is E Kane.

a buyout of a 35+ contract would work just like it would for any other player. the thing with a 35+ contract is the cap hit still counts in the situations where a "normal" one wouldn't. if a player full on retires, the cap hit still applies. if a player is sent to the AHL, the cap hit still applies. if the player is suspended by the team for not showing up for camp, the cap hit still applies. the idea with some of these contracts that run until the player is 42 years old is those last years, the team would assign the player to the minors, and then not require him to report. if the contract was signed while the player was under 35, the cap hit would be gone (under the older CBA), but the player would still get paid. win win. a 35+ contract, though, doesn't work like that. you'd still take the hit, no matter what. with the new CBA and the reduction in ability to bury salary in the minors, the difference between a normal and a 35+ contract is less. at the time pronger signed, though, it was profound. essentially, you are not able to bury a 35+ contract. it will always apply in full to your team's cap number. the kind-of-exception is a buyout. "kind of", because a bought out contract still applies to the cap number in general, it is just altered. a 35+ contract doesn't change that.

@radoran This is what I mean by a sloppy example, though, because it mentions specific things that are not directly relevant. In the above example, it isn't that Pronger is put on injured reserve on/after the first day of the season that allows for additional relief. It is that they cleared cap hit via demotion to drop down to the cap ceiling before putting Pronger on injured reserve. Either go up to an overage exactly equal to the player's cap hit, or down to exactly the cap ceiling for maximum relief, but you can do it at any time. The example could be written where they demote the two players on the last day of camp, bringing them all but equal to the ceiling, and then LTIR Pronger the very next day. And then recall the two players. All a week or two in advance of opening night. We're on a similar page, I don't mean to preach. The CBA is just so confusing to begin with, when they introduce moving parts to their examples and those parts don't have any practical impact is frustrating. People start looking for ways the irrelevant details relate to the big picture, and all kinds of misunderstandings happen.

Well, not exactly. LTIR allows relief to the amount required to "replace" the injured player's salary, with the qualification that if the team is over the cap at the time the player is placed on injured reserve, they are deemed to have already replaced the salary. their cap ceiling is adjusted to whatever cap number they were at prior to the LTIR, to a maximum of the standard ceiling plus the player's cap hit. There are two problems with the scenarios provided. One, the introduction of opening day in the second one makes it sound like that day has some importance in the calculation. It doesn't. Two, they don't cover all situations, and obfuscate the relevant point. Which is that the team is able to exceed the cap ceiling by the amount required to replace the injured player's cap hit. Your example of only having relief of $400k if Pronger is LTIR'd while the team is $4.5mil under the ceiling is a far better example. It would be the same if he were LTIR'd while the team was $400k over the ceiling. If the team is exactly at the ceiling, then they'd get $4.9mil in relief. If they are $4.9mil over the cap, they'd get $4.9mil in relief. Again, those scenarios are word for word from the CBA, with "pronger" and "the Flyers" Swapped in for "the player" and "the club".... And CBA example scenarios seem intentionally written to shed as little light on the overall mechanics as possible.

@radoran You're right. Without Pronger, the Flyers would be able to add $11.6mil in cap hit today. As it stands, they can only add $6.7mil. That is the primary complication of the Pronger deal. Arguably, the only complication. Here's the thing, though, the reason I don't see it as a big deal. If the Flyers added $11.6mil in cap hit over the next two months.... They'd still have to dump $6.9mil of that by opening day. You correctly point out that right now they'd need to move umberger, VLC, Grossman to open up the cap space to make a big add.... But even without Pronger, they'd need to do that anyway. Just not now, they'd have three months to get themselves even, but still, salary would have to be cleared. Either way. So, functionally, the Flyers are working with the same cap situation as anyone else, but have less figure-it-out-later space than a team without a permanently LTIR player.

@radoran you're...sending me a primer? if the flyers end camp at $4.9mil over the cap ceiling, they can immediately assign pronger to the long term injured reserve, and will then receive $4.9mil of overage allowance. the articles get into the timing of the cap space itself for maximum cap relief, but that isn't what we're discussing. we can discuss it, if you like. the examples in the one article are technically correct (as they are word for word from the CBA), but are misleading. flyers can LTIR pronger on the last day of camp, and depending on the specifics of their cap situation at that moment, can get anywhere from full relief for his cap hit all the way to no relief. right then, right away. they don't have to hold their breath until opening night. end camp $4.9mil over the cap is a perfect senario. ending camp right exactly at the cap would work just as well, though no better. ending a little above or a little below is where the problems arise. look, it isn't great, but the only real problem is the reduced effective overage allowance during the offseason. and while that sucks, even if you wanted to leverage all $6.9mil of overage in pure acquisitions (which, maybe not the best idea, really), you'd still have to find a way to get back to the cap at the end of camp. only difference is that the flyers are now forced to open cap space to add a cap hit. without pronger, they'd be able to add cap hit while planning on opening cap space in the next 6 weeks. i don't think a little zero sum is the worst thing.

yeah, i mean, flexibility is good. the real thing is the 10% let's you wing it a little, and figure out the details later. make the deal you can't afford, but so long as it isn't more than 10%, you've got two months to figure it out. less overage equals more need to make it work right now, gain salary-lose salary, no layaways. which, maybe isn't such a bad mode for the flyers to be in right now.

true. but these past two drafts have seen the flyers really focused on dmen. for good or ill. there certainly will be a bunch in the pipeline in 2 or 3 years, here's to hoping a couple of them pan out.

tagging space ceases to be an issue as of tomorrow. and pronger can be put on LTIR on the last day of training camp. there is no reason to enter the season hobbled. it is a problem, but let's not get carried away. functionally, the only issue it causes is it eats a large percentage of the offseason overage allowance, as you point out.

I'm not sure how it is biting them in the ass now. The 35+ aspect to it, anyway.

That is, in fact, what a qualifying offer is. A minimum contract offer that secures rights and first refusal for the next year.

@alaskaflyersfan 11 of 19 picks over the last three drafts have been dmen, that is stock piling. By the odds, 2 or 3 of them will turn out to be nhl players. 4 years ago and further back, the Flyers were grabbing dmen at a "normal" pace. These last few years they've really focused on it. We'll see if any work out, but the more dice you roll, the more likely one comes up a 6.

True. Point is, there is a good chance that this is VLC's last contact. Does he want to end it as a 4th liner occasionally shoe horned into other spots, with a persistent buzz out of home team fans that he is a waste.. Or might he want to end things as a contributor, regardless of where that might be? He gets paid the same either way, so which sounds like the nicer last few years of a career?

Because he fills a role, where Hartnell did not. Umberger on the third line makes a lot a sense. Hartnell anywhere, really, was a "where else are you going to put him?" he got first line minutes because he needed high end players around him to produce, and his physical game isn't all that enough to make him a good checking player. It was a swap of role players, a player who can play a role for a player who needs to have a specific role. It isn't so much about making the team better as it is about making the jobs to be filled clearer. I agree that umberger isn't going to get first line minutes, but in the end, he's shown that he can produce the same numbers as Hartnell if given the same opportunities. He just still has something to offer elsewhere in the lineup.

I'm not sure where the "he sucks" stuff is coming from, but his price point is likely to be above what the Flyers can swing. At the right price, though, he'd be a good add.

i don't think so. primeau was 34 when he played his last game, so contract was definitely an under 35...and he stayed on LTIR until that last contract ran out. that was 2005, so under the capped CBA.

@Polaris922 The real kicker is that holmgren et al didn't realize pronger's deal counted as a 35+ contract. He signed it as a 34 year old, but was 35 by the following Sept, so, was a 35+. There initially was noise out of the Flyers camp to the contrary, but then they read the cba and everything went silent. Which is why I feel a $100k/yr deal salary to me would ultimately save them money and be a smart signing. The pens have, imo, made a mess of their situation (imagine the first line - second line dynamic they could built with assets from a malkin trade), but the flyers screwed up true with the pronger deal. Then again, he hasn't gone and played in Europe or refused to report, so it is still all LTIRable, so, really, no harm, no foul. The pens, meanwhile, are still trying to make a center/top heavy 1 and 1a line thing work, so...in the end, I give the Flyers the win.

I dunno, I thought it was pretty impressive.

An issue with prospect goalies is they take forever to get to the point of knowing if they are gonna turn out, and get in each other's way. Two farm teams, four spots total, only two real starting spots for the early twenties development almost all goalies need. And one of those is kinda crap.

@Vanflyer i don't think it'd count against the max contracts. because the contract is gone. buyout window closes monday, btw. also, i think this is a bad idea.

He said in the post, about $1.5mil against the cap for 6 years.

i don't think so, really. i mean, in theory it sounds good, but there are a whole lot of really really crazy skilled players out there for whom defensive priorities just don't exist. there was a point in time, not long ago, where that was a big and often permanent knock on a defenseman. bryan mccabe, sheldon souray, joni pitkanen. subban has been offensively impressive, but his 53 points fall pretty short of mccabe and souray's career bests of 68 and 64 points. or better yet, mike green's multiple 70+ point seasons. i guess that's the thing i don't really understand. there is a pretty solid consensus around here that those 4 one-way, offense-only dmen were what they were (or are what they are, in pitkanen and green's case), and they weren't/aren't going to change those stripes. AND, most agreed/agree the kind of tradeoff those players represented, the acceptable of defensive liability required to leverage their elite offensive ability, wasn't worth it. bryan mccabe was a point machine, but your goalie was gonna have to work his tail off when mccabe was on the ice. subban has come some distance in learning to pick his spots (AND happily has cary price behind him), so his possession game has ended up being more valuable than his defensive unawareness is damaging. there really wasn't any way of knowing that at draft time, though. most guys with that game keep playing that game, and the math is way harder to justify. PLUS, subban still doesn't kill penalties. i still don't know i like the tradeoff. how weird is it to be in a situation where late in a must-win game, up by one goal, defensive zone face off, opposing goalie pulled.....and you make a point to bench your #1 dman on the bench and get your #2 over the boards? where there would actually be cause for concern if the faceoff was after an icing, and your #1 was trapped on the ice for this all-important defensive draw. that just isn't what that position is supposed to be.