What if - Cap Hit

Yellowknife (CP) With Ottawa trading Andrej Meszaros to Tampa Bay today, I couldn’t help but notice two things; one he just became the 8th member of YDP that was also on TB’s NHL roster; Lukowich, Fedotenko, Afanasenkov, Cibak, Ouellet, Boyle, Carle & Meszaros. Second, the announcement of him signing a contract with an average salary of $4M per year got me thinking. What if RHL teams were responsible for their player’s NHL contracts? If this was the case YDP would have a cap hit in RHL20 (2008-09) of $80.896M (in a $56.7M cap world). Ignoring the misalignment of our current roster (2006-07 based) with the NHL cap, the thought of cutting $24M off my current roster would make even a numbers guy like me dizzy. After the very painful exercise I was still over by $1M. This included the releasing of Sakic, Getzlaf, Rolston, Tanguay, Bouwmeester and Boyle. After breaking out in a cold sweat I decided not to continue this project for other teams, but I suspect many teams would exceed the NHL hard cap and some teams would match and likely break YDP's $80M mark.

Ima Dumass (CP)