Former Hockey Fan
Joined: Jun. 2017
Posts: 13,144
Likes: 10,516
The major problem with using LTIR is that it doesn’t allow you to accrue cap space. A cap hit is measured daily in the NHL, so if you have cap space to start the year, you can use it later on, since your final cap hit is an average of your daily cap hit. It is very beneficial to have this accrued cap space, because if you don’t, it’s very hard to make a deal. The thing about LTIR is that it allows you to exceed the cap, but you don’t get any cap space. For example, say Vegas is at $81 million without Clarkson, he would bring them up to $81.5 million (the ceiling) and that would be their cap hit.
So if someone gets injured on Vegas and they need to call someone up from the AHL, they wouldn’t be able to do that, since they could be over $81.5 without Clarkson. This usually isn’t a huge problem with teams not using LTIR, since they would have already accrued cap space, or will do that in the future; but for Vegas, due to Clarkson they can’t accrue any cap space and might end up over the cap at season’s end.
So basically they don’t need to move him, but keeping him is a huge pain in the butt whenever they want to make a roster move.