Edited Mar. 6, 2020 at 3:35 p.m.
Quoting: wdhowell
Thanks for the input. I would say that Vancouver is up against cap pretty hard, so it isn't so much as real dollars and cents as it is the AAV. If the cap raises to $88M next season, this becomes far less an issue for them.
That’s what I said, for a cap-floor team, the contract isn’t toxic at all. For a team up against the cap, it’s one of the worst in the NHL (behind every longer term deal in SJ and all the other deals handed out July 1, 2016). But that’s also the beauty of the contract at this point. There is value for a cap-floor team in that if they accepted a trade for Eriksson, they only have to pay him 5mil real dollars while getting 12mil of cap value over the remaining term. That allows those cap-floor teams to reduce operational costs during those poor years, making the team more profitable than needing to pay a 6mil/per-player, the full 6 mil to hit the cap floor. And for 2 years, that’s not a bad deal for the cap floor team.
Now, the Canucks or similar teams still need to give up something to make it happen, I’m certainly not saying they wouldn’t. BUT, they wouldn’t have to give up as much as what Calgary would to unload Lucic, or what SJ will have to give up to unload Jones, and eventually Karlsson/Burns/Vlasic/Couture/Kane when all those guys start to slide in performance-to-pay ratio ... which some of them are very close to already doing on very fresh contracts. Think of what SJ would have to give up to unload the last 4years of Karlsson’s 11.5/yr deal if his play continues to spiral down!
The cap will never go to 88mil next year, mark my words on that.