Lmao

Why not. NHL basically let Kucherov take 5x longer than your average person to recover from surgery. Everyone knew that’s how they were going to cheat the salary cap and they were rewarded w a cup.

Not cheating if it's allowed.

Same with the sort of defamation accusations - it's not slander if it's true.

More “ cheating” than cheating but I don’t blame Tampa. They basically didn’t hide the fact they were going to do this and the NHL allowed it.

Like more frowned upon… like yeah you won but …. Did you really need to win like this? They more than likely would have to dump Killorn and TJ. They probably should have won anyway lol

Richard Nixon type move

The businessman in Bettman is so glad that an organisation in his league has learned the fact that loopholes are the literal gloryholes in this world. No wonder he smiled so much when TB won the cup.

Chicago was the first team to do this but it wasn't 20 million over the cap. It's like.. "yeah we got no shame and we're going ahead with this".

My question is why weren't Dubas and Shanny a bit shameless too? Matthews was playing with a wonky wrist for the last 30 games of the season.

The NHL is a joke of a league comparing it to it's direct competition.

If I’m Toronto I’m making heavy claims that Tavares needs season ending surgery and I’m signing 12m in free agents lol. Tampa made a blue print of how to win and teams need to follow it. Lol

Different. Kane was hurt during the season that year. Kucherov made a 6 week recovery time into a 6 month recovery time. He should have been clear to play mid season

They seriously need to look into the loopholes a LTIR rule like this could do. While allowed, I'm not denying it's a bit farcical to be able to do things this way.

One easy way of preventing such things happening again is either have a salary cap in the playoffs or enforce a rule that a player have to play X amount of games in the regular season to be able to participate in the playoffs.

Now to be fair as a Dallas fan I can confirm that Kucherov had the same sort of injury which lead to a hip surgery, and the recovery time on that is expected to be around 5 months. That's pretty much the amount of time Seguin was off since his injury. Can't see how Kuch could've recovered THAT much faster - think it's conjecture.

He got the surgery in the off-season …

So did Seguin. November 2nd was the date. If he returned just before April, that totals up to 6 months.

He got the surgery Dec. 29th, normal recovery time 4.5-5 months. Timing was beneficial for sure, but he came back on a normal recovery schedule.

Kuch also started feeling the specific hip injury in the first week of December. They tried a couple rounds of cortisone injections over the next 2-3 weeks, but they didn’t do enough. After this, surgery was then scheduled during the Christmas holiday week for Dec. 29th.

Tampa congrats on the win 2 in a row is a hard thing to accomplish. There is really no shame in using the rules to your advantage. Every team in the league goes into each season looking for a way to take advantage of the rules legally and Tampa found the best way possible. Fans of other teams wouldn't be complaining if their GM had thought of it first. Did Tampa circumvent the cap? YBYA they did but they stayed withing the rules to do it. So hats off the Briesbois for his out of the box thinking. I just wish that the Habs team that took Vegas out in 6 games had shown up for the Tampa series, that would have made it at least a slight bit more interesting. Like they say though, you have to lose the championship before you can win it. I hope Montreal comes back next year and takes another good run at it with a slightly better outcome lol.