Quote:
Originally Posted by getbak
I think CapGeek has grossly misinterpreted how this will be done. It doesn't make any sense to penalize a team worse if a player plays 9/10 of his contract than if he plays 6/10 of it.
I believe that when the league says a team won't receive a credit for a negative cap benefit it means that if a player is traded part-way through the contract, and at the end when the recapture is calculated, one team's recapture amount is less than zero, they won't receive a cap bonus for the negative recapture.
To really get an idea of how absurd that calculator is, look at Ovechkin. He has a 13 year contract that pays $9M per year for the first 6 years, and $10M per year for the final 7 years. Using the calculator, if he retired after playing 12 years of the contract, the recapture penalty would be $2.769M. The problem is that the way his contract is structured, the Capitals never receive any cap advantage on it. After 12 years, he will have been paid $114M, and the total charged against the cap will have been $114.46M. Somehow, they would be penalized nearly $3 million despite having negative cap benefit.
How it should work is to take the total amount the player has been paid and subtract the total amount that has been charged to the cap. If there is a positive difference, the amount is divided by the number of years remaining on the contract at the time of the player's retirement, and that's the total recapture value. That number would be split proportionally between all of the teams who received some cap hit benefit from the contract.
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Exactly. The blogs out there on this are wrong. Period.
The line about not receiving credit for negative benefit is only designed to keep teams from stockpiling cap space for future years. They can't GAIN cap space in future years, they can only lose cap space.
If there wan't such a clause, a team could sign a player to a long term contract, with a cheap year at the beginning, have the player retire after one year, and that team could have extra cap space the next year.
Capgeek's calculator used to actually calculate this correctly, but now it appears to be changed - likely due to this misinformation.
As I said before, the logic to get the numbers being talked about here doesn't make sense. Teams can still be screwed by a player retiring, but not to the silly extreme being talked about here.
I do think it is interesting that a player could be traded this offseason, never play for the original team again, but could all of a sudden take some cap space away from the original team ten years into the future.