On the weekend, reporter after reporter pushed Darryl Sutter on his ability to fit Jay Bouwmeester into his salary cap log jam for the 2009-10 season, and when Darryl Sutter is pushed Darryl Sutter reacts.
“It’s really not that hard,” Sutter told The FAN 960. “If they got even past Grade 10 in math, they should be able to figure it out.”
Well this is true but a little limited in analysis.
Grade 10 or not I can see that the Flames do seem to have about 10 million in cap space if they don’t bring back their expensive free agents from last season. Should Mr. Sutter wish to use 6.5M of that 10M on one defenseman it certainly holds together. Whether it’s the best way to fill out a balanced roster is up for debate, and an issue that lands on the onlooker’s opinion of the Flames forwards as they stand.
Thin up front and it could be a bad idea. A group of young player ready to take on more responsibility and things should be fine. Call me on the fence.
The real issue isn’t next season though, it’s the season after that and the potential for a shrinking cap. The Flames with Bouwmeester in the fold will have roughly 41.6M tied up in only ten players. This weekend at the draft the NHL announced a 100K increase to the salary cap for the 2009-10 season, a fact that seemed to confuse the hockey media into thinking the recession is over.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
The 2009-10 Cap is based on revenue generated in the 2008-09 season. The recession certainly hurt the walk up crowd in the NHL this past season, so any increase is certainly a good sign, but it hardly a stayed execution for the 2010-11 season.
Renewals for 2008-09 season tickets were done in the spring and summer of 2008 and had little impact from a down-turning economy. Those numbers, that is the renewals, will be hammered in a lot of US cities, and especially in the nontraditional hockey markets.
Where will that cap number land? I don’t have the foggiest but it could reach 10% landing the cap at roughly 51M.
Should the Flames leave 11 players to fit into 9.5M of space? Seems dodgy to me.
Jay Bouwmeester is a great hockey player and a great addition to the Flames, but colour me worried a year from now if the Flames are throwing in top picks and prospects ALONG with a key member of the core just to shed salary.
Other Cap Talk
I know it’s vogue in the NHL to hammer Sutter for his lack of vision when it comes to last season’s cap and the fact that he iced a beer team in the last two weeks of the season.
It started in Calgary with a writer that lies in wait for cap issues he can attack, and Sutter issues to do the same.
Everyone joined the party after that.
However, the pundits that hammer this detail are really short sighted in how the cap works and how many teams would have faced the exact same situation.
In the last ten games, teams can not use the long term injury clause in order to get replacements for high end players. Not sure why that is, but it’s a rule and the Flames certainly tripped into it.
But looking at the salaries that were maimed in that process it becomes very clear that the Flames were not the only team that would have been skewered by this rule if injuries hit other clubs.
The Flames lost their top four defenseman during this time period when Dion Phaneuf, Robyn Regehr, Corey Sarich and Adrian Aucoin all went down. That’s a total cap hit of 18.2M in injuries. Apply a simple one week of 27 in this season ratio and you get 700K of salary that can’t be replaced with the Flames only having 189K of cap space. However, no less than seven other teams would have had the same problem given their relative cap space in 2009/10.
Did he gamble on a lack of injuries? He sure did. Was he along in this gamble? Not in the slightest as Calgary, San Jose, Dallas, Detroit and the Rangers were all in the same boat.
