poor JT, I wonder if his parents can convince him that he is too good for the islanders?

quite awesome.

tap that

Slow clap….

but i’ll comfort victor, not him. johnny t can have a piece of the cake i made for easter.

I wonder if he will hold out?

We’ll get him when the Islanders fold.

Morrow had his four rings with him for luck.

I liked how the “rumblings” about JT’s OHL playoffs so far lowered his stock. (Oh yeah, he sucks now, dump him…)

Ahhh, this mulligan year has paid off.

Sweet….for all this hard work can somebody bring me an ice pack? I’m dying from working off the beer gut in ball hockey.

Hold out JT!!! Brian Burke (and the geniuses running the Isles) will handle it from there.

Detroit is pulling the pants down on the NHL and CBA for the last few contracts they’ve signed for the last little while.

They’re signing they’re big players for long term deals, bringing down the cap hit to very friendly dollar values (read: zetterberg, franzen) and ripping the CBA for all its worth.

Does no one realize that these players can retire at any time and the cap hit rolls off their backs like water on a duck? The players can be buried in the minors for little dollars (if they last that long) or they won’t count for anything once they retire against the cap? The cap hit only applies to players that sign deals at what, 30+ years old is it?

I’m not totally well versed in the cap and how it works with older players, but if you sign a young player for 10 years, what does it matter if he retires and / or you send him to the minors when he gets older?

Sign these guys for 40 years if you have to, but give them their money in the first 4 -5 years, then do with them what you want. The cap won’t matter if their last years are worth nothing. Bury them in the minors, let them retire. Either way, they get their money, and its circumvents the cap. Holland knows what he’s doing, and I think Wang knew what he was doing with DiPietro. This cap system is flawed, and front-loaded deals are going to be the norm going forward as far as I can see.

Actually, it’s 35 or older that dollars still count against the cap, even if the player is sent to the minors, retires, or whatever. So yes, a player signed to a long-term deal at 28 years old could retire at 37, and if the last few years of the contract were $1 million each, he’d lose hardly anything off the total value of the contract and the team wouldn’t have the cap hit – but would have still benefitted from the reduction in cap hit it provided over the player’s productive years.

There is already whining from some people(fans, MSM) about how such deals “violate the spirit of the salary cap” and this “loophole” will surely be closed in the next CBA. I think it’s smart – the rules are there, if the owners wanted the salary amount in a given year to count against the cap instead of the average over the contract they could have written it that way. I think the owners left in means for cap circumvention because each of them thought he could use them to take advantage of other owners, and they grumble if someone else beats them to the punch.

(The salary numbers even have to be structured so that they can’t vary too extremely – so you can’t give someone $47 million in the first two years, and then have the remaining 28 years be at $1 million each, reducing the cap hit on a thirty year contract to $2.5 million per year, so the fact that there are stipulations about how contracts can be structured is to me a dead giveaway that this kind of idea was in their minds all along.)

It was absolutely hysterical to see how horrified Tavares looked…he almost resembled Steve Francis when the Vancouver Grizzlies drafted him

In Bill Simmons terms, that was the “John Tavares Face”