Why would ottawa make that trade and only get a 4th. Gaborik contract is insured and they dont have to pay him.

I couldn't find anything say his contract was anything more than a normal IR contract, which to me meant Ottowa still owed him the money. Was there a special circumstance on the trade due to his back injury that I missed when looking it up?

All contracts on LTIR are insured by the league. Otherwise all good teams would be trading with sens for those players.

That's a good point, but he's actually only listed on IR, not LTIR, on CapFriendly which made me think it would be easier (at all possible) to trade for his contract with minimal added on to a player who can contribute in any way.

Stop it. LTIR or IR, may not no difference on who actually pays Gaborik's salary. More than likely it's the insurance company. Still why would the Sens want to pay out of pocket 4m for Backes next season? Plus ignoring the fact that Backes has M NTC and can easily block any trade to a team with cap space.

My thought process (as bad as it seems to be) was that Ottowa would really only be taking on 1.2 mil more in cap for a player to actually contribute. This was me going purely off cap numbers, and not taking in to consideration (due to ignorance/naiveness) that they may not actually be paying any of Gaborik's salary at the moment. And as for the M-NTC I'm going off the assumption Backes would rather play in the NHL than the AHL, but maybe I'd be wrong.

The team can choose to either put him on IR or LTIR. LTIR means they can spend above the cap ceiling by his cap hit in order to replace him if they wanted to. IR there isn't any cap relief, the player just doesn't count as an active player on the roster anymore. So they can add another player to the roster and go over the 23 man limit. But once again, no cap relief. There is also some differences in how long the player must be "injured" for to apply for either category. If you have small injury that only has you miss 1-2 games or whatever, you can't go on LTIR because the player must not be able to enter the lineup for X amount of days to qualify for LTIR. Its so teams can't "cheat" the system. They still do however but its technically legal.

Ottawa has him on IR solely so that they can stay above the salary cap floor while not having to pay him. That's it.

Late edit: Ottawa purposefully doesn't want players that they have to pay actual dollars to. They actively want Gaborik because they aren't paying him but his cap is helping them reach the floor. So Backes being healthy enough to play at least a little forces them to have to pay him. They don't want that at. They'd prefer a 700K player instead of Backes so they can keep the salary overall lower.

So, here’s the big thing about the backes trade. Gaborik is on LTIR for the rest of his career, and his contract is 80% insured. So next year the sens owe him 615K. Next year Backes is owed 4 mill. There’s no way Ottawa does that, and there’s no way Backes waives to go there.

Toffoli...ugh. I’m sick of hearing about him. In his last 112 games he has 19 freaking goals. No thanks.

Appreciate the input, I didn't realize that's how the difference between IR and LTIR worked.

Bcarlo25- I know he struggled last year, but he's back on a 20 goal pace this year. Do you not think he has the skill set to gel and succeed with Krecji?

Sending Backes to the AHL saves the Bruins minimal cap space. It saves them 1.075m, But then they have to fill that roster with let's say a 900,000 player. Cap saving $ 100,750. Do Bruins want to scare off any other potential signings just to save 100,000 in one year of cap?

Yeah Backes isn't waiving from Boston to Ottawa, Not even in the realm of possibilities.