Quoting: drewjenks
You can still make back diving contracts....they are just more strict about it. The lowest years salary can't be less than 50% of highest years salary.
And the salary can't reduce by more than 30% (or something similar) from one year to the next.
So they could have given him an 8-Year deal like:
9,000,000
9,000,000
7,000,000
7,000,000
5,000,000
5,000,000
5,000,000
5,000,000
--------------
$52,000,000 TOTAL
$ 6,500,000 CAP-HIT
The two keys would be:
1) NOT INCLUDING a NTC for the final 3 years.
2) INCLUDING a verbal agreement along the lines of "if you're so bad we can't trade you in year 6, 7 or 8 .... than you have have to retire due to injury so we can LTIR you".
- Wheeler would say yes because he's guaranteed $10,750,000 more, and still gets paid a similar amount over the first five years.
- Winnipeg would say yes because his cap-hit is nearly $2,000,000 less, and they wouldn't lose sleep because any 37 year old will choose a fully paid LTIR retirement over the AHL (if it came to that).
Dunno why more teams don't structure deals like this (there's a reason the Leafs traded Clarkson for Horton's contract .... and it's because Horton is retired).
Thanks. I clarified that in a later comment. Yes, the 50% rule was something I was looking for a link for so thank you for detailing that. By Back Diving I was really referring to ones wherein the salary drops from say 10M in the first couple years to 1M in the last couple. A variation of a couple million is more like “sliding” than “diving” but it’s completely semantics so ??♀️. I also mentioned later on the Cap Recapture penalties that can be assessed should a player retire. Of course, in your scenarios an injury - or an “injury” (cough cough Hossa cough) - could partially circumvent that. LTIR isn’t quite as good as having the full cap space but it’s close enough.