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Regular Hurricanes readers can find my latest Canes blog from yesterday in the archives. I am taking a small break from straight Canes coverage for this blog, but it does include another iteration of the Semin for Richards possibility that I have mentioned previously.
So straight from the files of Clarkson for Horton, here are a couple salary cap-induced trades that are in the same bizarre category but make perfect sense:
1) Marc Savard to Arizona to help reach the salary cap minimum without actually spending the money. Savard is scheduled to make $575,000 over the next two years but has a cap hit if $4M. That is about as efficient as you can get in boosting your cap number without actually spending money. The even more ironic thing is that when this call gets made, the Bruins will actually have most of the negotiating power. Savard is and will be on LTIR, so he is not a cap problem for the Bruins and the $575k cost out of pocket is a drop in the bucket for Boston. So when Arizona makes the call, Boston actually gets to request some kind of modest return for doing the favor. Note that this deal could happen over draft weekend, but maybe makes more sense to wait until late July after the Coyotes do some work in free agency and have a better idea of if/how much salary cap they must add to make the minimum.
2) Alexander Semin to Los Angeles for Mike Richards only to get bought out before he even arrives in California. The Kings are one of the teams really up against it salary cap-wise and need to rid themselves of a contract or three to make the numbers work. They have been and will again shop Mike Richards but after his disappointing 2014-15 campaign, there will be no takers at his full $5.75M cap hit for 5 years. Once the Kings start having to retain the maximum 50% of his deal to unload him, a buyout enters the discussion. If the Kings get to the point where they decide to buy out Richards, I think an intricately designed trade for and then buyout of Alexander Semin makes sense. Richards contract only pays $4.5M/year over 5 years (so the real dollars ($22M) are about equivalent to Semin's ($21M). But Richards total cap hit is actually much higher at $28.8M compared to only $21M for Semin. The Canes would get a fresh start and a potentially good 2nd line center in return for unloading a big contract. If the Canes throw in some modest futures (a mid-round draft pick or two) for doing this favor and possibly retain a tiny amount of Semin's contract to even up the $ both teams end up better off. The only small downside for the Kings is that the salary cap hit for Semin's buyout is about $400k higher for six years, but the positive is that it ends after six years instead of ten. (So Semin's buyout would be $2.3M for six years whereas Richards would be $1.9M for ten years --- someone please check my math.)
Who has other bizarre deals that actually make sense in the crazy cap-driven NHL?
Twitter=@CarolinaMatt63
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