Comments on: Will unpaid bonus money no longer count against cap in the new CBA?

By: elvispocomo

elvispocomo — Mon, 05 Nov 2012 19:05:43 +0000

Under the old CBA it was the bonuses counted against the cap until they could no longer be attained. This does seem to be a separate qualification for teams wanting to count them before they are attained as having made the cap floor. I can see an argument for how if those bonuses aren’t attained then a team might drop below the cap floor and be in violation suddenly, and the NHL wanting to avoid that possibility.

I think it makes more sense to have them included until they aren’t attainable to keep the floor teams from having to spend more if they can’t afford it as well as preventing the ceiling teams from spending more, then letting the teams make adjustments from there.

By: Jason Brough

Jason Brough — Mon, 05 Nov 2012 18:24:59 +0000

Good comment. I added “unpaid” before bonus.

By: Brian

Brian — Mon, 05 Nov 2012 17:56:35 +0000

You’ve misstated things a little here, Jason. What’s been said is that teams can’t use bonus money to get to the cap floor, not that bonus money will no longer count against the cap, period. I was wondering about this the other day myself, but quickly realized that the league can’t possibly mean the latter when they say the former, for the fairly obvious reason that if bonus money doesn’t count against the cap at all, rich teams would immediately be offering players rather large bonuses with low actual salaries.