NHLnumbers.com is an invaluable resource for monitoring the allotments of millions of dollars to NHL players, and judging your team’s standing in relation to the NHL’s salary cap. It also allows you to play armchair GM a bit during the offseason, and fantasy-negotiate with your team’s restricted and unrestricted free agents. The salaries and contract duration for every NHL player — as well as those on two-way deals –are delineated there. The numbers there aren’t iron-clad accurate, but the accounting of them is sourced from multiple, reliable venues, including the NHLPA, and they ought to be I think accorded credibility while also afforded latitude for the at times complex financial arrangements teams have with individual player contracts.
Long before the Caps were crowned Southeast division champions last month team management knew that its player costs for 2008-09 would be appreciably higher. Even with Olie Kolzig’s departure the January contract extension for Alexander Ovechkin and the performance of restricted free-agent-to-be Mike Green assured that. And, obviously, Kolzig must be replaced.
To appreciate, though, just how significant a hike in payroll the team will endure, I calculated only the on-the-books-for-next season contract commitments. Those numbers confirm that the rebuild is over.
Keep in mind that the Caps will have counting against their cap hit a healthy number of players who may not play for them next season. Chris Bourque, for instance, may or may not make the club, but he will earn $525,000 from the team. Ben Clymer almost assuredly will not play for the club, but he will earn $1.1 million next season.
(In 2007, the Caps had a buyout with Nolan Yonkman that counted for $75,000 against the cap. They paid Frederic Cassivi $40,000. That’s pretty much peanuts when you’re talking tens of millions of dollars in a cap, but it’s illustrative of how a payroll balance sheet in the NHL has more on it than just the 20-odd sweaters skating on the sheet below you on a given regular season night.)
The Caps spent about $11 million on defensemen last season — and one million of that went to Clymer. They spent just a hair under $7 million in net. The bulk of that obviously went to Kolzig. Goaltending won’t necessarily be cheaper next season as in addition to resigning Huet or another no.1 at a premium price, both Simeon Varlamov and Michal Nuevirth will move into pro careers with the organization.
And the team spent just about $23 million on forwards in 2007-08.
Deadline acquisitions such as Huet and Sergei Fedorov are prorated against the cap, which is particularly helpful in a case such as Fedorov’s, as Columbus picked up the lion’s share of his $6-million-plus salary last season.
According the NHLnumbers, the Caps by early spring 2008 were on the hook for just under $42 million in salaries and bonuses counted against the cap — whereas at season’s start, when the team was closer to $39 million in payroll, it had about $12 million of cap room to spare. One of the reasons George McPhee was able to be so aggressive at the February trade deadline was the cap space he had this past season. Look for him to have a lot less of that in 2008-09.
Recall that when hockey returned post-lockout in 2005-06, the salary caps was at $39 million. In 2006-07, it jumped up to $44 million. This past season it stood at $50.3 million. The salary cap was envisioned as a system of cost controls for the owners, but in three short years it sure has risen fast, hasn’t it? Draw your own conclusions, but recall how the resolution of the 2004-05 labor impasse was characterized — with the owners having the players over a proverbial barrel. I’m not sure it’s quite worked out that way.
We won’t know for some months still what the salary cap will be for 2008-09, but educated guesses peg it in the mid-fifties-million range.
| Player | ‘07 - ‘08 Salary Cap Hit | ‘08 - ‘09 Salary |
| Alexander Ovechkin | $3,830,000 | 9,000,000 |
| Alexander Semin | $1,300,000 | 4,200,000 |
| Mike Green | $833,000 | Brinks truck |
| Cristobal Huet | $630,000 | Brinks truck |
| Chris Clark | $1,050,000 | $2,750,000 |
| Nicklas Backstrom | $2,400,000 | $2,700,000 |
Accounting for just those players’ salaries on the team’s books for 2008-09, NHLnumbers has the Caps committed to forty one and a half million dollars for next season. Alexander Ovechkin’s salary accounts nearly a quarter of that. Moreover, consider that the ranks of the unsigned for next season include a no.1 netminder; Mike Green; Sergei Fedorov; Brooks Laich; Matt Cooke; Matt Bradley; Shaone Morrisonn; Steve Eminger; Boyd Gordon; Eric Fehr; and Quintin Laing.
Oh, and Karl Alzner.
Now Brian Pothier’s $2.5 million is included in that $41 million-plus figure, and his future is quite uncertain. But even if the Caps were to gain cap relief for Pothier, the signing of just Green, Alzner and a goalie, you have to figure, is going to push the payroll fairly close to $50 million. Conceiveably, that might leave the Caps with less than $5 or $6 million of cap space to sign seven or eight name bodies familiar to Caps’ fans. And of course, no NHL team wants to be pressed hard against the cap.
To state the obvious, it will be George McPhee’s most challenging offseason in terms of player contract negotiations and cap management.
It seems reasonable to posit that Olie Kolzig’s play as a middle-thirtysomething netminder during the first two seasons after the lockout was distinctly solid. Not spectacular, clearly, but quite solid. He didn’t have the most formidable blueline corps in front of him, which to some extent his numbers reflected, but few in the sport would have pointed to those seasons and suggested that Olie Kolzig was no longer a no. 1 netminder in the NHL.
This is about business. The business of winning hockey games. And the cold hard reality is that in this Olie Kolzig NHL offseason the skill set he has to offer is at odds with the present composition and ambition of the only NHL hockey organization he’s ever served. Gordie Howe shouldn’t have left Detroit, ever, but this isn’t a mythical, age-resistant athlete we’re talking about. Olie Kolzig, somewhat sadly, but also somewhat predictably and certainly rather naturally, is aging away from the Capitals’ ascension.
Ready the DVRs (does anyone use a VCR anymore?) for Comcast SportsNet at 5pm on Thursday. ‘Washington Post Live’ is leaving the studio for a day and taking the whole show to the concourse of Verizon Center for a full slate of Caps’ talk.
Was in the then MCI Center the night of March 13, 2001 — also deadline day — when earlier in the day GMGM dealt Zednik and Bulis and a pick to Montreal for Zubrus and Linden, and the mood in last night’s rink felt larger and more significant . . . that dealmaking carried a component of risk; this was pure aggression with minimal assets heading out . . . the better comparison may be with March 1997, carried out not in a single day but over the course of a couple of weeks, when McPhee, in his first season on the job, added Brian Belllows and Esa Tikkanen . . . Enjoyed most of all throughout the late Tuesday afternoon and evening messages from friends and strangers who were busy with business throughout the day and wholly unaware of the deadline day madness that enveloped the Caps, who arrived at the news late and lavished it (in my email inbox) with happy obscenities and exclamation points . . . Mike Vogel, looking terrifically telegenic, rinkside on Comcast in the 5:00 hour to help analyze the breaking big news, me comparing his polished appearance before TV DC with his pre-sunrise, blogging-through-the-Moscow-night, comrade shagginess with me during last year’s Worlds . . . big bonus: dinner with Ron Weber in the press room on such a big day . . . look at all the media big wigs who show up when hockey creates the day’s sports buzz: George Solomon of the Post, three Times’ reporters, the one-time 
