“Money for nothin’ and chicks for free.”
Ah Dire Straits, never become irrelevant.
From Nichols On Hockey:
Elliotte Friedman was on Calgary’s Sportsnet 960 on Monday morning.
On the Boston Bruins:
“One of the things they’re looking at is trading Marc Savard. Now, for those of you who are unfamiliar, Marc Savard is never going to play again, unfortunately. He has a concussion issue. However, he has two years left on his contract. The cap hit is just over $4 million. I think it’s $4.07 million. However, his actual cash the next two years is $525,000 and it’s going to be picked up mostly by insurance. I think about 60 percent of it is going to be paid by insurance. So if you’re a team that gets that contract, you’re only going to have to pay about 240,000 of it.
“So that’s a great bargain if you are looking to get to the cap floor. And when I really sat down and did the math – I heard about this on Saturday afternoon. I checked with Peter Chiarelli and he didn’t really want to tell me, but he didn’t deny it either – so I knew it was kind of true.
I heard about this on CBC’s telecast of the Bruins/Leafs game on Saturday and at first I was shocked.
It never really hit me that a team would be interested in acquiring Marc Savard’s contract, even after the Tim Thomas to the Islanders trade in 2013 or the David Clarkson for Nathan Horton swap at the trade deadline. If you put the emotions aside though it makes total sense. Freidman does a great job of explaining it in the passage above. A team would realistically only have to pay about $240,000 of their own money to Savard and the NHL’s insurance would handle the rest.
Gary Bettman stated in December 2014 that the 2015-2016 NHL salary cap will project around $73 million. Using HockeyBuzz’s Cap Central they have the Bruins sitting at $59,530,000. If the cap stays at the projected $73,000,000, the Bruins will have about $13,470,000 with a couple big free agents looming, namely Dougie Hamilton and Carl Söderberg.
It isn’t just Dougie and Carl though.
Restricted Free Agents:
Brett Connolly
Ryan Spooner
Dougie Hamilton
Niklas Svedberg
Then a slew of Providence Bruins such as Tommy Cross, Matt Lindblad, Alexander Fallstrom, Justin Florek, David Warsofsky, Rob Flick, Justin Smith, etc.
Unrestricted Free Agents:
Greg Campbell
Dan Paille
Carl Soderberg
Adam McQuaid
Matt Bartkowski
As you can see there aren’t many prized unrestricted free agents the Bruins will be losing this summer. I’d be surprised if any of them outside of Danny Paille even come back. The free agent pool this year isn’t amazing, but it isn’t bad either. There’s some young defensemen who could come on this team and finally give Chara the reprieve that he deserves.
So where does Marc Savard fit in to all of this?
Well teams are going to need to get to the salary floor. Much like the Tim Thomas deal to New York, the Islanders knew they weren’t going to have a player who was going to see the ice but took him to make sure that they were cap compliant. Teams like Arizona are going to need to do this, especially since they don’t carry a ton of high salaries. Arizona projects at $35,655,277 in salaries for their contracted players next year.
Savard’s actual salary goes down, like Friedman mentioned, while his cap hit stays the same at $4,027,143. This means at that instead of putting Savard on the LTIR at the beginning of the season and then being able to account for that cap space, Boston would be able to trade him and use it during the summer to sign and/or trade players. This would put Boston around $17,497,143 in cap space going in to the offseason.
Are their emotional ties to the player? Of course. The guy still actively roots for the Bruins (which makes sense because he’s still technically under contract with them) and is active on Twitter about his love for the team. Unfortunately it is a business decision the Bruins must make and I would be shocked if Peter Chiarelli didn’t make this move to free up more space after a year where Boston had to let talent walk because they couldn’t afford them.
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