tomh009

Many people shook their heads at Edmonton's contract with Koskinen, but he finished the year with a .917, significantly better than Price's .909. Even if we were to retain $4M, Price would still cost the Oilers $2M more than Koskinen. Would they really be that desperate to get Price? And Edmonton will not have much cap space, either ... if I wanted to make a D deal with them, I'd go for Bear (whose RFA contract may be too expensive for Edmonton) rather than long-term prospects. Or maybe even send an offer sheet to Bear?

Arguably that would not be quite losing him for nothing, as we would be able to retain one of our skaters instead. So it could be, for example, we give up Price (and his big contract) and get to keep Lehkonen or Mete instead.

It's all about the hot dogs!

That was rumoured, yes. But it's very rare to see any kind of official confirmation on rejected offer sheets.

If Sergachev doesn't like the offer, he doesn't sign the sheet, and the Habs don't need to wait. And no one will ever even know an offer sheet was sent to him.

30 other teams missed him, too. This happens regularly, there are always hidden diamonds in the rough. I doubt the Leafs knew how good he was when they picked him at 53.

So ... various sources are reporting that there is a draft agreement between the owners and the NHLPA on a CBA extension, as well as the return to play plan for this year. Quote from The Athletic: https://theathletic.com/1909008/2020/07/03/all-the-details-of-the-current-framework-for-the-nhls-new-cba-agreement/ They are actually proposing to do exactly what I suggested: base the cap on the season two years prior, so that the revenues can be fairly accurately estimated, and they can minimize the amount of escrow, after a transition period.

Exactly.

Which is basically an escrow by another name!

I'd like to see a total of five games for the Habs, with a double-overtime loss as the last one!

The only way to avoid escrow is to set the cap on the previous season's revenues (or the season before that, depending on when you need to finalize the cap). When they negotiated the cap they (both owners and NHLPA) decided they wanted to us actual revenues, so escrow is required. Expansion fees were not negotiated in. Stupid? If they had asked for this, they would have probably had to compromise on something else. Seattle is paying roughly $22M per franchise; that could potentially be an additional $10M in salary cap per team -- but only for one year. So how would a GM deal with that? Would there be a feeding frenzy for one-year free agent contracts in an expansion year?

Now, that's a whole different discussion. But the players are not forced to play, they can sit out the remainder of the season. Yes, there would be a financial impact, but most of them are in very good positions financially (at least from a normal person's perspective) so they should be fine. Some of the lower-paid team staff might not be in as good a position to make that choice, though.

The CBA doesn't address teams' franchise values at all. And I don't think the owners would ever agree to that, either. What the CBA does do is share the hockey-related revenues between the owners and players. Basically, the players will get 50% of the revenues in any given year. But, because no one knows the actual revenues until the end of the year, but the players need to be played throughout, a portion of the player salaries is put into escrow. At the end of the year, a portion of the escrow funds will be returned to the teams, in order to ensure that the revenue sharing ends up at 50-50. It really isn't a penalty as such. Even if we penalized teams for going over the cap, the player salary escrow would still be needed (see above).

That's a very fair point. Timmins for sure earned his pay that year.

The Athletic chose the best draft (of the last 20 years) for every NHL team. For Habs, they chose 2007: https://theathletic.com/1848921/2020/06/29/wheeler-every-nhl-teams-best-draft-of-the-last-20-years/ Now, none of those four play for the Habs today, but we do have (Shea) Weber, Suzuki and Tatar for PK and MaxPac. (Yannick) Weber didn't pan out, while McDonogh was given away in the Gomez trade. But it's interesting that the Athletic (Wheeler) picked it as potentially the best draft by any team in the last 20 years.

And I agree with this ... there is a very good chance that one of the top-eight-ranked players will still be available at 9th pick, because one or two teams will pick someone not ranked in the top eight. So, ninth should still be a very solid pick.

There really were no good options. This has its downsides but so did all the alternatives.

There is a way to fix this stupid tanking problem. All it takes is willingness to make a change. https://www.sportsnet.ca/hockey/nhl/shane-doan-tanking-gold-plan-nhl-lottery-draft/ So, I can't see this happening anytime soon.

What’s the 87.5% scenario — we pick ninth?

Maybe Julien could engineer a few "too many men" penalties at key points in the series? Or request too many reviews to trigger a penalty?

Could he sign another contract to cover the rest of 2019? This is really idle speculation, but what else is there to talk about?

AHL teams will lose their ticket revenues (and sometimes concession revenues). Attendance of 6.5M total, assume $20 average (some spectators will not have paid) for a $130M total gross ticket revenue. Subtract maybe $10M (or more) for operations costs for home games. That would leave $120M to be covered by 30 NHL teams, or $4M or so per team. A pretty small percentage of an NHL team's budget (really it would be $2M paid by the team and $2M paid by the players). On the other hand, you could leave the AHL on its own, and just hope that it (or the team you care about) doesn't collapse. Logically, it makes sense for me, just like Boeing and Airbus are supporting their suppliers. But, yes, getting all the owners to agree might be a non-starter.

In the no-AHL scenario I would play ... oh, crap, I don't know how to even make this work. If there are to be no spectators allowed, what the NHL should do is fund AHL teams so that they can continue to play. It's not a massive cost to the NHL. And otherwise the teams will not be able to develop their prospects. And will, in the worst case, lose them to a European league or KHL.

Thanks, that was a good read! But your article does say we could extend Lindgren, even though it's not likely?

Yeah, I agree that he's unlikely to be a solution. But if it's a choice between Lindgren and another Niemi/Kinkaid-level UFA, I'd rather stick with the devil we know.