[Oling_Roachinen]

It's more nuance then that, but if he signed today at 8M for 8 years, he would cost 4M in the first half, and 4M in the second half...for a total of 8M of cap against the Flames at the end of the year, duh.

But really what's happening, if there's 180 days in the NHL season, he's counting $8,000,000/180=$44,444 a day against the cap. By season end, he counts 8M against the cap (180*44,444)

If you sign him 90 days into the NHL season to an "8M*8 year" contract, assuming the contract is uniformly distributed with no signing bonus, he would make 4M this year, 8M a year for the next 7 years, for a total value of 60M. His cap hit in years 2-8 would therefore be 60M/8= 7.5M.

His cap hit this year would be 15M. His cap each day is much higher at 15M/180=$83,333 but he's only counting for 90 days, so he would count as 7.5M against the cap by years end.

Nylander signed a 45M, 6 year contract. Had he signed it at the beginning of the year the cap-hit is easy and obvious at 7.5M. However since he signed it late in the season, through signing bonus and salary structure, he will earn 41.72M on it. So 41.2M/6=6.96M which is his cap-hits for seasons 2 through 6 of the contract. However, since he signed it on day 59, his cap-hit was 6.96*180/(180-59)=10.3M for a full year in his first year. But again, since he only counted 121 days of the 180 day season, his cap-hit against the Leafs at the end of the season was...6.9M.

This ignores the December deadline, but there's more advantage cap-wise to hold out on signing an RFA. There was conspiracies against the Leafs negotiations with Nylander because the longer they waited the less he counted towards the cap the next years. Of course the huge downside is you don't get the player for those games. You'll always get a break in cap if you sign a player after the season started compared to if you had signed him in the off-season to the same contracts.

And this follows similar logic to trade deadline acquisitions. If you get a 10M player 3/4 of the way through the season, he's only costing 2.5M to the new team in total cap at the end of the season.