Quote:
Originally Posted by Mathgod
Is it outlandish for me to think that Vegas would have kept Stone & Martinez on LTIR until game 1 of the playoffs, and not try to trade Dadanov, if they were sitting comfortably in a playoff spot?
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Yes, it is. They returned Stone and Martinez to the lineup because they were required by the LTIR rules to do so. (The poster who said they are not required to do so is incorrect. Most of the LTIR rules are not written in the CBA, but in separate documents. Multiple sources have reported that these documents specify that a player must return to active status when medically cleared.)
The Knights were able to make cap room to activate them because they had several other players on regular IR.
That regular IR is the elephant in the room, and OptimalTates and I seem to be the only ones who can see it. At one point, that $93-million payroll (which people think they can call a $100-million payroll because reasons) translated into only $55 million worth of players actually on the active roster. At one point, if my memory of Capfriendly serves, the Knights had
eight players on injured reserve, but only three of those were on LTIR. That's because you don't put injured players on LTIR unless and until you need the cap relief. It isn't some sinister coincidence that those guys went on LTIR when the cap relief was needed; it's how the system is supposed to work.
The obvious fact of the matter is that Vegas had plenty of injured players that they could have put on LTIR at any time. When they needed to activate Stone and Martinez, they put some of those players on LTIR to stay within the rules. It wasn't some brilliant but evil conspiracy. It was a team that got greedy with the Eichel trade because they had to collect
all the toys, and spent the rest of the season bungling their way through the cap hell they put themselves in. The biggest bungle of all was the failed Dadonov trade, and the result of all the bungles collectively is that they are probably going to miss the playoffs for the first time in franchise history.
But some people will go on telling themselves it was an evil master plan. There was no such plan.
