The Canucks signed star goalie Roberto Luongo to a humongous 12-year, $64 million deal today. The many non-sports fans among my dear readers should keep reading, though, as there’s an interesting business angle to this story.
The NHL operates under a salary cap system. For the 2009-2010 season, teams aren’t permitted to pay their players a collective salary of less than $40.8 million (call that the ’salary underpants’, maybe?) and no more than $56.8 million.
This system, also used in other professional sports leagues, encourages parity and fairness among the teams. Teams in big cities like New York, can’t buy a championship by waving big money under the noses a slew of star players. On the other hand, a nefarious owner can’t, for whatever reason, operate a team on minor-league salaries. The NHL cap is only four years old but, by my estimation, so far, so good.
There are lots of ways, some legitimate and some dubious, to manipulate your salary cap ‘hit’–what your salaries are counted as against the cap–throughout the year. There’s even a slangy job title for the numbers man inside your organization who pays attention to these things–he’s a ‘capologist’.
A Handy Loophole
Most hockey players hang up the skates around the age of 35 or so. So why have the Canucks signed a 12-year contract with the 30-year-old Luongo that would have him playing through his 43rd birthday?
The deal, you see, is front-loaded. Luongo will earn much more money in the first few years of his contract than the last few. In fact, in the last two years, he’s only (forgive me, but this is professional sports) earn $2 million and $1 million respectively.
However, when the league calculates how a player’s salary impacts the salary cap, they take the average per year salary. When his contract kicks in next year, despite the fact Luongo makes $7 million in the first year, the ‘cap hit’ the league counts is only $5.33 million. This gives the Canucks valuable flexibility in managing the salaries of the other 22 players on the roster.
Will Luongo play until he’s 43? Almost certainly not. He’ll retire when he’s ready, and decline however much money is left on his contract.
It’s a loophole, and one that’s being exploited by several teams at the moment. It will be closed in the next few years, but everyone expects these existing super-long contracts to be grandfathered in.
Training Camp is Just Around the Corner
With Luongo signed long term, I like how the team is shaping up this fall. They recently acquired some defencemen who should be able to fill Ohlund’s skates, and the signing of Mikael Samuelsson seems like a wise move. It would be great if Cody Hodgson or Michael Grabner could make the team, too.
Luongo’s deal makes blue-chip prospect goalie Cody Schneider a high-value, tradeable asset. I expect GM Mike Gillis to hold off until well into the season before the goalie is moved, though. Gillis will assess the team, decide what they need, and use Schneider to buy it.
What do you think? Is the Luongo super-deal a good thing?
I haven’t written anything about the Canucks for a while, so here are a few thoughts on the draft, recent free agency activity and the rest of the summer:
In the first round of the draft, the Canucks selected Jordan Schroeder, a 5′8″ American forward from the University of Minnesota. College players usually take longer to development, and enter the NHL later, so don’t plan on seeing him in a Canucks uniform any time too soon. He led the US team in scoring at the World Juniors last winter, so that’s encouraging. Hopefully he’s the second coming of Cliff Ronning. Here’s a two-minute video profile of him.
Credit Canucks GM with re-signing the Sedins. I hoped and expected this to happen, but I think it’s an excellent deal. $6.1 million a year is, to my thinking, a little below market value for these guys. That money makes them the 34th and 35th best-paid players in the league (great looking salary site there, by the way). If you check out some of those players (Jovanovski, Stastny, Gaborik, Gomez, among others) ahead of them on the list, that money looks well spent.
The team lost Mattias Ohlund, which was almost a certainty. Ohlund is never a player who’s seemed comfortable in the limelight, so I suspect he’ll be quite happy being more anonymous in Tampa Bay.
Maintaining the Canucks’ Swede quotient, Gillis signed Mikael Samuelsson. The 32-year-old winner scored 19 goals and added 21 assists last season. He’ll make a decent replacement for Taylor Pyatt, who I expect to be signed by another team over the coming weeks. Well, a decent replacement on the ice. Samuelsson’s eyes are decidedly less dreamy than Pyatt’s. More importantly, Samuelsson has a ton of playoff experience and even played with the Sedins for a bit back in Sweden.
The team extended restricted free agent Kyle Wellwood a qualifying offer, which I imagine he’ll sign. He was kind of a revelation this year, and an excellent reclamation project. They same goes for another RFA, Jannik Hansen.
I’m optimistic that the team won’t re-sign Mats Sundin. He’s done, and looked it in the playoffs.
The Canucks’ most urgent need is on the blue line. Even with Ohlund, the defence looked decidedly creaky against Chicago in the playoffs. They urgently need to get younger and faster. I’ve read some rumours about signing Francois Beauchemin, who would be a great addition. Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s anybody on the farm team who can step up, and the team doesn’t have a lot of spare assets with which to make a trade.
So, what will the line-up look like come the opening night of the 2009-2010 season? Here’s my best guess:
Sedin - Sedin - Burrows
Samuelsson - Kessler - Demitra
Raymond - Wellwood - Bernier
Hordichuk - Johnson - Rypien
I participated in a playoff pool draft tonight, so I had to map out my predictions of who would make it to the finals. As you might imagine, it’s as much about picking the teams as it is the players. A mediocre player who plays 22 post-season games is more valuable than a great player who only plays seven:
Yes, I think the Canucks will beat St. Louis and fall to Detroit in the second round.
Of course, these things are all about probabilities and mitigating risk. It’s likely that a dark horse will emerge and unpredictably make its well deep into the playoffs. But that’s difficult to guess correctly, so I went with likely outcomes and I’m hoping for the best. Here are the players I ended up with:
ZETTERBERG
MALKIN
SEMIN
M. GREEN
HAVLAT
CHARA
KRONWALL
RYDER
BURROWS
HOLMSTROM
GUERIN
GETZLAF
UPDATE: Had I known about Rinkology’s fancy bracket creator (thanks to James for the pointer), I would have used that yesterday instead of plain old pen and paper. Here’s a more legible edition (click for a larger version):
Which, in truth, is pretty unremarkable. Hordichuk, for the non-Canucks fans, is a fourth-line enforcer whose principle job is to work hard and occasionally beat on other players. This was last Friday, and apparently he was returning to Vancouver to be with his wife who was having a baby. I wouldn’t have recognized him–James pointed the NHLer out to me.
We saw his driver first, a huge bald man in a black trench coat. To our amusement, he was carrying a sign that read “Mr. Darcy”. Maybe, I thought, he’s just a lonely Pride and Prejudice fan? I snapped a quick photo of the two of them, waiting for Mr. Darcy’s luggage.
How big is that guy? Hordichuk is listed at 6′1″. I know the perspective is off, but that is one large driver. You’d imagine that an NHL enforcer probably doesn’t need much off-ice back-up. But you get the sense that, to quote The Bourne Identity, the big guy knows how to handle himself.
I was talking to somebody about this morning. I doubt they will, but I really have no idea. Less idea than usual when it comes to the Canucks. So, let us vote:
At the start of the year I made a couple of predictions regarding the Canucks. One was that Mats Sundin wouldn’t sign with them–I was obviously wrong about that. The second was that they wouldn’t make the playoffs. For a while there I thought the team was making a fool of me on that front, too.
But like a teenage boyfriend, they never fail to disappoint. This the Canucks team I’ve come to expect after twenty-odd years of fandom. Mediocrity, thy home is Vancouver.
A Low-Hanging Scapegoat
There are plenty of fans calling for Alain Vigneault’s head. Here’s something I’ve come to realize about NHL coaching: when the team does well, the players receive all the praise. When the team falters, the coach’s head is the first one on the chopping block.
On the one hand–to mix my metaphors–the coach is the lowest hanging scapegoat. He doesn’t cost as much as the players, is immediately replaceable and usually isn’t adored by the fans.
On the other hand, the average fan has very little insight into what the coach does. As witha team’s general manager, we get a tip of the iceberg view of an NHL coach. We see him behind the bench, watch him pick lines and observe how the players execute his strategy. We have no view into what happens off-ice, at practice, and only have a vague sense of his coaching during a game. We don’t see how Vigneault spends the majority of his time.
The first critique of a coach is often that the players appear “unmotivated”. I always find that silly. These guys make, on average, more than two million dollars a season. They are elite professionals–the best in the world. Does a brain surgeon need motivation to excise a tumour? Does a trial lawyer need motivation to win a case? If the players can’t get “up” for a game, they have only themselves to blame.
About half the forwards are playing well offensively at the moment. The Sedins are reliable as ever, Kesler and Burrows are shouldering more than their fair share, and Hordichuk and Johnson are ably filling their roles. Everybody else has been sub-par, and the team’s defence has looked pretty shoddy. Even the usually-reliable Willie Mitchell has been coughing up the puck in the defensive zone.
Truth be told, I have no idea what’s wrong with the team. Any suggestions?
I’m very glad Sundin wasn’t signed for next year at $10 million, as per the initial offer. If he sucks over the next six months, the Canucks will be well rid of him. Still, even if he only scores at a, say, 45-50 points for a season pace, that’s a handy player to have around. So, at worst, the team gets a little better and loses nothing (in terms of cap space or assets) in the long term.
That sounds a bit naive, doesn’t it?
Thus far, the Sundin experiment has been pretty miserable. After nine games with the team, consider the numbers:
He’s got three points, two goals (one into an open net on the powerplay) and an assist.
He’s taken eight minor penalties.
His +/- is at -6.
Compare that with the cheaper Brendan Shanahan, another mid-year pick-up who is three years older than Sundin. In five games, he’s got three goals and an assist.
Even if you ignore those numbers, Sundin has clearly not found last year’s playing form. He’s always the slowest player on the ice, he consistently shuns the “dirty areas” in front of the net, and he struggles defensively.
Even if Sundin does find his game, the Canucks face an uphill climb to make the playoffs. Calgary more or less has the division locked up, so Vancouver needs to battle to secure sixth spot, thus avoiding a first round series against San Jose or Detroit.
A Soft Bunch
And even if they do make the playoffs, I’m worried about the team’s make-up. Consider the team’s top-six forwards: Sedin, Sedin, Demitra, Wellwood, Pyatt, Sundin and Kesler. After Kesler and Pyatt, that’s a pretty soft bunch. And grit becomes more important in the post-season, not less.
I’d much rather the team tank it than stagger through the rest of the season in ninth or tenth spot. If the Canucks are obviously sellers at the trading deadline, then the could get very good value for their veteran defensemen (assuming they waive their no-trade causes) and the likes of Taylor Pyatt and Pavel Demitra. That would put them in a better position for next year. Instead, they’re liable to barely miss the playoffs. Looking back, I see that that’s what I was hoping for last July.
I know I’m late to this ballgame, but I just saw this and it struck me as pretty amusing:
This isn’t the first of these remixes that I’ve seen using this snippet from the exceptionally good German film Der Untergang. Is there a Hitler video generator out there on the web somewhere?
We had a couple of no-shows at the planned post-BarCamp hockey pool, so we weren’t quite quorate. I thought I’d take one more kick at this particular can and suggest a virtual pool, run in real-time over Skype.
I was thinking next Monday, October 6 between 5:30pm and 7:30pm. I know four games will have been played by then, but I don’t think that particularly matters.
I figure Skype is probably the most ubiquitous, simplest tool in which to run the draft. If you’ve got another suggestion–I guess Twitter would be a possibility–fire away.
If you’re interested in joining said, uh, Automagical Virtual Hockey Pool, leave a comment.
If we get enough, I’ll run it. If not, I’ll watch the 2008-09 season with a stake in only one, meagre, non-playoff team. And if there’s a torrent of interest, the maximum number of participants is 15. All other rules are as on the BarCamp wiki.
Because I’ve been thinking about this weekend’s hockey pool, and the forthcoming season. Heck, I even caved and ordered cable so I could watch some Canucks games at home.
The Red Wings will repeat as Stanley Cup winners, beating out the Habs in the finals.
Sidney Crosby and Evgeny Malkin will finish one-two in the scoring race, but a lack of healthy defencemen will prevent Pittsburgh from reaching the finals.
Los Angeles and the New York Islanders will battle it out for worst in the league (and thus the best shot at drafting phenom John Tavares). I’m giving it to the Kings (despite Barry Melrose’s presence in Tampa Bay).
Mats Sundin will bide his time until December and sign with a team that promises to make a playoff run. That won’t be the Canucks because…
The Canucks won’t score enough goals to make the playoffs.
The Sedin brothers will give up hockey and become Mormons. Doesn’t this photo scream “we’re wearing temple garments under our golf shirts”?
I guess those are all pretty safe bets. What are your predictions?
