The 2009-2010 Colorado Avalanche

Tucker a RW? I know he can do it, but is that how we used him last year?

Good stuff. I was actually also just writing up a very similar post which illustrates the team’s cap room and contracted players’ cap numbers.

Here are some of my thoughts/observations: For those of you scoring at home, it looks like the players with the asterisks (*) denote players with no trade clauses. Here is an explanation of each one of those:

NTC – player cannot be traded without his consent; consent not required for waivers for assignment to minors.
    NMC – player cannot be traded, waived for a claim by another team, or assigned to the minors without his consent. [This does not protect the player from a buyout.]
-——————
Adam Foote, COL – NTC
Scott Hannan, COL – NMC
Milan Hejduk COL – NTC
John-Michael Liles, COL – NTC [can name up to 18 teams he will not accept a trade to]
Ryan Smyth, COL – NMC

http://www.nhlscap.com/no_trade.htm

Restricted Free Agents Jones, McLeod, McCormick, Verance, Cumiskey, and Budaj have estimated salaries based on the minimum qualifying offer that the team must make to retain their rights. These numbers are not absolute; the team could choose to walk away from the players. Offer sheets could be made by other teams. Or, the team may even offer any of these players more than the minimum offer.

To that end, Peter Budaj made $800k last year, so his minimum qualifying offer only has to be 105% ($840k) and not the 110% or $880k DDC posted.

Qualifying Offers
The current team must extend a “qualifying offer” to a restricted free agent to retain negotiating rights to that player.

Players who earned less than $660,000 in the previous season must be offered 110 percent of last season’s salary. Players making up to $1 million must be offered 105 percent. Players making over $1 million must be offered 100 percent.

If the qualifying offer is not made, the player becomes an unrestricted free agent.

If the player rejects a qualifying offer, he remains a restricted free agent.

http://proicehockey.about.com/od/nhlfreeagents/a/nhl_free_agents_2.htm

Based on the cap numbers that I posted of previous top 5 picks, I do agree that whoever (Duchene?) the Avs select with the third overall pick will have a cap number around $2.8-2.9 million. I was actually using an estimate of $2.85 million :)

Lastly, DDC used an estimated upper limit of $56 million. The upper limit this year was $56.7 million and it has not yet been announced what the 2009-10 upper limit will be. Based on this estimation, DDC is right that the Avs are not as hard up against the cap as some other teams out there. But with those estimations, adding the salaries of a legitimate number one goaltender and a top six forward (or a top 3 draft pick) and fleshing out the rest of the roster (the minimum player salary for 2009-10 is increasing from $475k to $500k http://www.nhlscap.com/cap_faq.htm#max_min) could put the team very close to the upper limit.

But, that is not to say that management will want to spend all the way upto the upper limit, especially on a rebuilding team. Unless of course they believe that that team can turn things around and rebuild in one year a la the 2006-7 Flyers to the 2007-8 Flyers. But, I don’t think that any of us are fooling ourselves into thinking that this Avs team is making bold enough moves to have that quick of a turn around.

So the question has to be asked: Why hasn’t Tucker been bought out or given his outright release to facilitate the signing of Lappy and make a roster spot available for a youngster on this rebuilding team?

Screwing the Avs long term.

1. Looks like Tucker’s signing last season is gonna cost us Lappy.

2. Stastny is way overpaid. I’m sorry, but he is. He should have been given closer to 5 mil for 3 years to see how he did.

3. ??

4. Profit!

Come on, DDC!

Ongoing update

His $1.033333 million cap number is significantly higher than was his minimum qualifying offer of $574k. And I expect Budaj’s to be similar. Speaking of Budaj, you still haven’t corrected the multiplier for his minimum offer;)

And the afore mentioned Buyout period of June 15-30th is now about half way over. Anyone see Tucker going anywhere?

Also, some speculative news regarding the 2009-10 upper limit:

LAS VEGAS — The players’ most important vote of the year was not totally completed Saturday.

Players here in Vegas voted on the 5 percent salary-cap inflator issue Saturday, but a shortage of reps caused the executive board vote to be delayed a day or two.

“We have a system in place that allows us to get the vote fairly quickly,” said NHL Players’ Association executive director Paul Kelly. “All of our reps were here when we had our initial executive board meeting on Thursday. We discussed this growth-factor issue in great length. We discussed it again in the meetings.”

The 5 percent inflator is a right the players have in the collective bargaining agreement to tack on to the salary-cap figure for the following season. If the players’ executive board (30 player reps) vote yes on the inflator, the NHL’s salary cap will be in the $56 million range for next season, almost unchanged from this season’s figure of $56.7 million. But if the players vote no, the cap would be in the $54 million range.

The betting money is the players’ executive board will vote yes.

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/blog/index?entryID=4275177&name=lebrun_pierre

The NHL should announce what the upper and lower limits for the 2009-10 season are before the July 1st free agency period begins and quite possibly before this weekend’s June 26-27 2009 entry draft.