Lecavalier has been bought out. It only becomes funnier when you realize that he is still owed 8 million in signing bonuses alone.
Of course, I'm not sure I'm allowed to laugh at that. Being a Flyers fan and all. *sigh* Anyway, almost 9 million in cap space. I dread Holmgren and free agency coming up.
Free agency begun today, and of course the crazy shit went down.
Flyers made out like bandits in my opinion. They already signed Streit and Lecavalier earlier to acceptable deals (they had dealt for Streits impending UFA rights before, and Lecavalier was allowed to negotiate before free agency officially begun because he was bought out). They picked up Ray Emery for a very cheap and reasonable short term deal as well and are probably running a tandem of him and Steve Mason in net for the time being. They shored up all their problems from last year (lack of a puck moving defenseman, goaltending, and a veteran forward as well as faceoffs) and they signed basically the best player available on each position except wing.
Flyers also resigned their star forward Claude Giroux on a $66.2 million deal, paid over 8 years.
At the draft the Devils basically officially ended the era of Martin Brodeur, as they traded for the young goalie Corey Schneider for their first round pick. Also the Devils added a sentimental note as they picked Brodeur's son.
Yesterday also one of the bigger deals in recent history went down, as the Boston Bruins and Dallas Stars swapped packages involving young center Tyler Seguin (picked 2nd overall in the 2010 draft) and 30 goal scorer Loui Eriksson.
Today kicked off with a bombshell, as Daniel Alfredsson who spent 17 seasons with the Ottawa Senators signed with the Detroit Red Wings for another chance at the Cup. Detroit also added Stephen Weiss.
Senators only had about two hours to be mad about this going down, as the next bombshell exploded when the Senators acquired star winger Bobby Ryan from the Ducks. Ducks had resigned former Goalscoring king Corey Perry and center Ryan Getzlaf earlier in the season to 8+ million cap hits and Ryan was the odd man out.
Nathan Horton, formerly of the Boston Bruins (who were in the Cup final just a couple of days ago) also produced a shocker when he signed a 7 year deal in Columbus. Horton will also have a shoulder surgery later this summer and will be out until December.
Rob Scuderi returns to Pittsburgh on a bargain. Not happy about that. Pittsburgh also resigned a bunch of their support players over the last couple of days, though they all are kind of over the hill in my opinion. They have next to no cap space left though they may want to trade away 5 million dollar goalie Marc-Andre Fleury who imploded in the playoffs for two years running.
New Jersey and Toronto are going for a contest of who is going to make the dumber signing today. Former Devil David Clarkson was a highly coveted player despite only producing 24 in the shortened 48 game season and 8 points in his last 34 games. Naturally the Maple Leafs sign him to a 7 year deal worth 5.25 million annually. Maple Leafs also sign their Restricted Free Agent Tyler Bozak for 5 years on a 4.2 million dollar cap hit, which he is also most definitely not worth it.
The Devils, discontent with losing Clarkson, signed Ryan Clowe to a 5 year deal worth 4.85 million each year. Clowe produced only 3 goals and 19 points in 40 games last season for the San Jose Sharks and Rangers. Devils also signed 37 year old Patrik Elias to a three year extension worth 5.5 million dollars each year, which is really dumb because his age means that if he chooses to retire, the cap hit does not come off the books for them. At least Elias is somewhat worth the money.
Surprising so far: 1) Jarome Iginla has not been signed yet. 2) The Rangers chose not to use a compliance buyout (meaning they negate the contract and don't retain any cap hit) on Brad Richards this year. He remains with the Rags for another year despite playing some godawful hockey last season, having 6.67 million dollar cap hit and the Rangers running the risk of suffering a cap penalty if he chooses to retire before his contract ends if he isn't bought out.
Sorry for being the only guy posting here so often, but this offseason is just crazy. Ilya Kovalchuk just announced his retirement from the NHL. Yes, really. The guy is only 30 and still owed over 60 million dollars by the New Jersey Devils. The guy retired 3 years into a contract that runs through 2025!
He says he wants to go back to Russia for his family and that he made that decision while he was playing in St. Petersburg during the lockout.
Kovalchuk's contract is also infamous for being the final straw in cap circumvention, and the Devils are still being forced to forfeit a first round draft pick next year (unless the NHL pulls back that) as punishment. They had the option to forfeit the pick during one of the next four years starting after the punishment was assessed. This year is the final year. No clue why they didn't forfeit it last year when they were picking 29th overall, but still. Without Kovalchuk the Devils may very well forfeit a pick in the top five next year.
Kovalchuk's retirement also means that the Devils get a cap penalty, meaning that because Kovalchuk's contract was longer than is allowed under the new CBA, the salary cap for the team will be reduced due him retiring before the term of the contract was completed. It is only a small penalty, $250k, but still, that 250k less than any other NHL team. Until 2025! There are also people who think that the Devils pushed Kovalchuk towards that decision because the cap penalty was only going to increase the close that player gets to retirement.
Hockey players want to play hockey. When there's a lockout, they go and play elsewhere for much less, if any, money. I don't see athletes in other sports ever doing that. Any pro athlete retiring at that age with that contract is weird. A hockey player is 100 times weirder. He must have something in his personal life.
NBA players did during the last lockout. You just didn't hear about it because Kyrie Irving playing in some Las Vegas league isn't really newsworthy. I don't know if MLB players ever really do. NFL definitely not.
The whole thing pretty much coincided with a number of people going bonkers over Justin Bieber touching the puck and stepping on the Blackhawks logo in their locker room. Correlation implies causation:
WTF is with these NHL teams signing guys to 15+ year contracts? That's crazy talk in any other sport. I'm seriously asking, what would compel a team to offer that deal to a guy?
WTF is with these NHL teams signing guys to 15+ year contracts? That's crazy talk in any other sport. I'm seriously asking, what would compel a team to offer that deal to a guy?
While the NHL has the longest contracts in sports (some of them aren't even listed here because the money isn't enough compared to other sports), it's not that crazy because other sports also have 10 year contracts.
The reason for these 12+ year epic contracts was the way the old, pre 2013 collective bargaining agreement worked. The NHL has a salary cap. A players salary number is determined by the total amount he is being paid under his contract divided by the number of years the contract is running. The total of the cap numbers of all players on the roster of a team must be below the salary cap. If you are above it during the season, you forfeit every game until you go under the salary cap.
In the case of these 12+ year contracts, the contracts have very low salary years tacked on at the end to push down the salary number for a player. Ilya Kovalchuk's contract for example is for a total of 100 million dollars over 15 years. However, the last 5 years of the contract total for only 10 million. The idea was that Kovalchuk would retire before then. He already understood that is contract is only 90 million in reality and only runs about 10 years. However, the salary number for him drops much lower. His salary number under this contract is $6,666,667.
After the lockout in the fall and winter of 2012/13, this problem has been filled. Contract terms have been restricted to only allow for players to be signed to 7 years as a free agent, or 8 years if you sign with the club your old contract was with. Thus teams can't cheat the system like this anymore.
If you would take only the first 8 years of Kovaclhuk's contract and the 79 million dollars he would have been paid during it, his cap number would be $9,125,000. Under the old CBA, the Devils essentially saved something like 2.5 million in cap hit every year which they would not have been able during this new CBA.
The new CBA also introduced a recapture penalty to punish teams for these old, ridiculous contracts. If a player who signed a contract longer than the new CBA allows retires, a formula calculates the "cap savings" a team gained for having that contract. Those savings, divided by the number of years remaining on the contract, are added as salary to the team for the remaining duration of that contract. This means that team's salary cap is effectively reduced by that amount. CapGeek has a very handy calculator for this which also shows which players are potential risks for teams because of this.
For the Devils Kovalchuk's retirement may actually be a blessing in disguise. They are going to suck hard this year, but the recapture penalty they face is only $250,000. This is going to last until 2025, but whatever. If Kovalchuk's contract had gone on longer, the cap savings would have piled up and they might have faced something like a cap penalty of $4 million or so from that point on until 2025. To put this into perspective $250,000 is less than half of league minimum for one player in a year. $4 million is the salary of upper middle class players.
The NHL finally announced that yes, NHL players will participate in the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi. They also finally released the schedule and with it the new division names. They are:
Pacific Division with Anaheim, Los Angeles, San Jose, Phoenix, Vancouver, Edmonton and Calgary. Central Division with Chicago, Nashville, St. Louis, Dallas, Winnipeg, Minnesota and Colorado. Atlantic Division with Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Buffalo, Detroit, Boston, Tampa Bay and Florida. Metropolitan Division with Rangers, Islanders, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Columbus, Washington and Carolina.
I fully expected the new division names to be "Gretzky, Howe, Orr, Lemieux". I'm glad it didn't end up that way, but the new names still are really dumb. How is the division with a bunch of teams situation on the east coast not named "Atlantic", but the division with a bunch of canadian teams, Detroit, Buffalo and two Florida teams is.
That said, it's still dumb that they grouped the Florida teams with the Canadian teams, instead of just putting Pittsburgh and Columbus there and call it the "North" division and let all the teams which are actually at the Atlantic Ocean (except Boston) be in one Division called "Atlantic". Well, I guess marketing the Flyers-Penguins rivalry takes precedence over any logical sense.
Is there lega online hockey watching? If not, what is best illegal online hockey watching?
Well, GameCenter Live on NHL.com is actually a pretty decent service which I'm actually paying for. However, unlike me blackout restrictions probably apply to you so I'm not sure that's the best solution. There is illegal hockey watching but of course that bears risks.
If interested, putting "ATDHE" into Google will help here. I take no responsibilities here though but that's pretty much how I watched hockey for a couple of years in college. I could probably also give some other, similar sites tomorrow after work.
I know the good illegal places. Just wondering if maybe I can use my parent's cable subscription to login and watch somewhere, like I do for NFL RedZone.
Best thing to happen to football in the last few years. Also the dude is super snarky.
There are two dudes. If you have DirecTV Sunday Ticket Red Zone you get Andrew Siciliano. If you have NFL RedZone you get Scott Hanson, who is the best.
The RedZone is the kind of thing that a fan would do if rebroadcasting were legal, and they had the equipment. Like a DJ mixing up live streams. And even though he works for the man, Hanson's got more of an edge. Like he's just a football fan doing it on Twitch. Feels a lot like watching those HaxMega MLP Streams with the PMVs beforehand.
I know the good illegal places. Just wondering if maybe I can use my parent's cable subscription to login and watch somewhere, like I do for NFL RedZone.
Why did you ask for the "best illegal online hockey watching" then?
I know the good illegal places. Just wondering if maybe I can use my parent's cable subscription to login and watch somewhere, like I do for NFL RedZone.
Why did you ask for the "best illegal online hockey watching" then?
I said is there legal online hockey watching? If NOT...
I wish the NHL would have a little more balance in how many games played. We play our second tonight, you've already lost your third. I doubt we'll win tonight. On the road against the Kings. 10:30PM, won't catch me up that late.
I wish the NHL would have a little more balance in how many games played. We play our second tonight, you've already lost your third. I doubt we'll win tonight. On the road against the Kings. 10:30PM, won't catch me up that late.
Pussy. I was up to 2AM last night watching a Flyers game (and yeah, I regret it).
Comments
Of course, I'm not sure I'm allowed to laugh at that. Being a Flyers fan and all. *sigh*
Anyway, almost 9 million in cap space. I dread Holmgren and free agency coming up.
Flyers made out like bandits in my opinion. They already signed Streit and Lecavalier earlier to acceptable deals (they had dealt for Streits impending UFA rights before, and Lecavalier was allowed to negotiate before free agency officially begun because he was bought out). They picked up Ray Emery for a very cheap and reasonable short term deal as well and are probably running a tandem of him and Steve Mason in net for the time being. They shored up all their problems from last year (lack of a puck moving defenseman, goaltending, and a veteran forward as well as faceoffs) and they signed basically the best player available on each position except wing.
Flyers also resigned their star forward Claude Giroux on a $66.2 million deal, paid over 8 years.
At the draft the Devils basically officially ended the era of Martin Brodeur, as they traded for the young goalie Corey Schneider for their first round pick. Also the Devils added a sentimental note as they picked Brodeur's son.
Yesterday also one of the bigger deals in recent history went down, as the Boston Bruins and Dallas Stars swapped packages involving young center Tyler Seguin (picked 2nd overall in the 2010 draft) and 30 goal scorer Loui Eriksson.
Today kicked off with a bombshell, as Daniel Alfredsson who spent 17 seasons with the Ottawa Senators signed with the Detroit Red Wings for another chance at the Cup. Detroit also added Stephen Weiss.
Senators only had about two hours to be mad about this going down, as the next bombshell exploded when the Senators acquired star winger Bobby Ryan from the Ducks. Ducks had resigned former Goalscoring king Corey Perry and center Ryan Getzlaf earlier in the season to 8+ million cap hits and Ryan was the odd man out.
Nathan Horton, formerly of the Boston Bruins (who were in the Cup final just a couple of days ago) also produced a shocker when he signed a 7 year deal in Columbus. Horton will also have a shoulder surgery later this summer and will be out until December.
Rob Scuderi returns to Pittsburgh on a bargain. Not happy about that. Pittsburgh also resigned a bunch of their support players over the last couple of days, though they all are kind of over the hill in my opinion. They have next to no cap space left though they may want to trade away 5 million dollar goalie Marc-Andre Fleury who imploded in the playoffs for two years running.
New Jersey and Toronto are going for a contest of who is going to make the dumber signing today. Former Devil David Clarkson was a highly coveted player despite only producing 24 in the shortened 48 game season and 8 points in his last 34 games. Naturally the Maple Leafs sign him to a 7 year deal worth 5.25 million annually. Maple Leafs also sign their Restricted Free Agent Tyler Bozak for 5 years on a 4.2 million dollar cap hit, which he is also most definitely not worth it.
The Devils, discontent with losing Clarkson, signed Ryan Clowe to a 5 year deal worth 4.85 million each year. Clowe produced only 3 goals and 19 points in 40 games last season for the San Jose Sharks and Rangers. Devils also signed 37 year old Patrik Elias to a three year extension worth 5.5 million dollars each year, which is really dumb because his age means that if he chooses to retire, the cap hit does not come off the books for them. At least Elias is somewhat worth the money.
Surprising so far:
1) Jarome Iginla has not been signed yet.
2) The Rangers chose not to use a compliance buyout (meaning they negate the contract and don't retain any cap hit) on Brad Richards this year. He remains with the Rags for another year despite playing some godawful hockey last season, having 6.67 million dollar cap hit and the Rangers running the risk of suffering a cap penalty if he chooses to retire before his contract ends if he isn't bought out.
Ilya Kovalchuk just announced his retirement from the NHL. Yes, really. The guy is only 30 and still owed over 60 million dollars by the New Jersey Devils. The guy retired 3 years into a contract that runs through 2025!
He says he wants to go back to Russia for his family and that he made that decision while he was playing in St. Petersburg during the lockout.
Kovalchuk's contract is also infamous for being the final straw in cap circumvention, and the Devils are still being forced to forfeit a first round draft pick next year (unless the NHL pulls back that) as punishment. They had the option to forfeit the pick during one of the next four years starting after the punishment was assessed. This year is the final year. No clue why they didn't forfeit it last year when they were picking 29th overall, but still. Without Kovalchuk the Devils may very well forfeit a pick in the top five next year.
Kovalchuk's retirement also means that the Devils get a cap penalty, meaning that because Kovalchuk's contract was longer than is allowed under the new CBA, the salary cap for the team will be reduced due him retiring before the term of the contract was completed. It is only a small penalty, $250k, but still, that 250k less than any other NHL team. Until 2025! There are also people who think that the Devils pushed Kovalchuk towards that decision because the cap penalty was only going to increase the close that player gets to retirement.
Hockey players want to play hockey. When there's a lockout, they go and play elsewhere for much less, if any, money. I don't see athletes in other sports ever doing that. Any pro athlete retiring at that age with that contract is weird. A hockey player is 100 times weirder. He must have something in his personal life.
The reason for these 12+ year epic contracts was the way the old, pre 2013 collective bargaining agreement worked. The NHL has a salary cap. A players salary number is determined by the total amount he is being paid under his contract divided by the number of years the contract is running. The total of the cap numbers of all players on the roster of a team must be below the salary cap. If you are above it during the season, you forfeit every game until you go under the salary cap.
In the case of these 12+ year contracts, the contracts have very low salary years tacked on at the end to push down the salary number for a player. Ilya Kovalchuk's contract for example is for a total of 100 million dollars over 15 years. However, the last 5 years of the contract total for only 10 million. The idea was that Kovalchuk would retire before then. He already understood that is contract is only 90 million in reality and only runs about 10 years. However, the salary number for him drops much lower. His salary number under this contract is $6,666,667.
After the lockout in the fall and winter of 2012/13, this problem has been filled. Contract terms have been restricted to only allow for players to be signed to 7 years as a free agent, or 8 years if you sign with the club your old contract was with. Thus teams can't cheat the system like this anymore.
If you would take only the first 8 years of Kovaclhuk's contract and the 79 million dollars he would have been paid during it, his cap number would be $9,125,000. Under the old CBA, the Devils essentially saved something like 2.5 million in cap hit every year which they would not have been able during this new CBA.
The new CBA also introduced a recapture penalty to punish teams for these old, ridiculous contracts. If a player who signed a contract longer than the new CBA allows retires, a formula calculates the "cap savings" a team gained for having that contract. Those savings, divided by the number of years remaining on the contract, are added as salary to the team for the remaining duration of that contract. This means that team's salary cap is effectively reduced by that amount. CapGeek has a very handy calculator for this which also shows which players are potential risks for teams because of this.
For the Devils Kovalchuk's retirement may actually be a blessing in disguise. They are going to suck hard this year, but the recapture penalty they face is only $250,000. This is going to last until 2025, but whatever. If Kovalchuk's contract had gone on longer, the cap savings would have piled up and they might have faced something like a cap penalty of $4 million or so from that point on until 2025. To put this into perspective $250,000 is less than half of league minimum for one player in a year. $4 million is the salary of upper middle class players.
Pacific Division with Anaheim, Los Angeles, San Jose, Phoenix, Vancouver, Edmonton and Calgary.
Central Division with Chicago, Nashville, St. Louis, Dallas, Winnipeg, Minnesota and Colorado.
Atlantic Division with Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Buffalo, Detroit, Boston, Tampa Bay and Florida.
Metropolitan Division with Rangers, Islanders, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Columbus, Washington and Carolina.
I fully expected the new division names to be "Gretzky, Howe, Orr, Lemieux". I'm glad it didn't end up that way, but the new names still are really dumb. How is the division with a bunch of teams situation on the east coast not named "Atlantic", but the division with a bunch of canadian teams, Detroit, Buffalo and two Florida teams is.
That said, it's still dumb that they grouped the Florida teams with the Canadian teams, instead of just putting Pittsburgh and Columbus there and call it the "North" division and let all the teams which are actually at the Atlantic Ocean (except Boston) be in one Division called "Atlantic". Well, I guess marketing the Flyers-Penguins rivalry takes precedence over any logical sense.
Click the link to read the rest:
http://the-toast.net/2013/08/05/a-cartoon-about-sports/
By not taking off their helmets they avoided a 2 minute minor...
But yeah, I truly intend to up my level of hockey-watching this season. I'm always disappointed I don't watch more.
If interested, putting "ATDHE" into Google will help here. I take no responsibilities here though but that's pretty much how I watched hockey for a couple of years in college. I could probably also give some other, similar sites tomorrow after work.
The RedZone is the kind of thing that a fan would do if rebroadcasting were legal, and they had the equipment. Like a DJ mixing up live streams. And even though he works for the man, Hanson's got more of an edge. Like he's just a football fan doing it on Twitch. Feels a lot like watching those HaxMega MLP Streams with the PMVs beforehand.
https://mediacru.sh/JpV4rLgCXdmu
1. Own Goal
2. Shorthanded Goal
3. Empty Net Goal
4. Goalie drawing a penalty
5. Glove drop at the puck drop
6. Failed boarding attempt