How the Canucks managed to set the PERFECT Opening Day roster to maximize their LTIR relief

Welcome back to opening day folks.

Well, we were close, but close only counts for horseshoes and hand grenades, as they say. It definitely doesn’t count with salary caps.

But, hey, we’re not terribly disappointed that we screwed it up. Because how many times in franchise history could we really have said that: The Canucks have far exceeded even our most optimistic expectations.

Yes, the Canucks are the first team in known NHL history to come up with a “perfect” Opening Day lineup that maximizes their available LTIR seat to the dollar.

Earlier in the day, the Toronto Maple Leafs were praised for perfecting their opening-day lineup up to $4, but then the Canucks had to come in from behind and drop a few toonies on them.

That’s how they did it.

We write:
Basically, [Season-Opening Injured Reserve is] an injured reserve reserved for those players who get injured in NHL training camp and therefore still deserve to pull their NHL paychecks while they recover, but who were never really in that team’s plans and unrelated to the upper limit have to do.

For these players, the rule is pretty simple: A two-way contracted player who played fewer than 50 NHL games in the previous season and who was injured before the inaugural draft gets his cap prorated by the number of days you have spent the previous season on the squad.

For Karel Plasek, who has been injured since pre-camp and had zero days on the Canucks roster last year, the math is simple: $0 cap hit.

It’s a bit more difficult for Phil Di Giuseppe.

We estimated that the SOIR hit would be somewhere under $100,000 for Di Giuseppe. In reality, it was exactly $146,250, and that extra hit proved key to assembling the perfect roster.

Karel Plasek, for the record, also went on SOIR and suffered no cap hit.

With that SOIR hit, the Canucks moved on to the second option we discussed in our article, the one that would invoke LTIR’s so-called “training camp formula,” described as:

ACSL = Team Cap Hit – LTIR player’s cap hit. (ACSL can never exceed the salary cap).

From there, they could exceed their limit on available cap space by the amount of Ferland’s cap hit while he was on LTIR (as in, for the rest of the season).

Given the above formula, it became a game that settled a roster (including Mikheyev, Myers and Dermott) that came so close to Ferland’s $3.5 million Above the upper limit of the $82.5 million salary cap as possible.

So the figure that had to be reached before Ferland was placed on LTIR was $86 million.

And the Canucks got it on their noses.

With yesterday’s line-up (Pettersson, Miller, Boeser, Pearson, Horvat, Garland, Kuzmenko, Lazar, Podkolzin, Höglander, Åman, Joshua, Karlsson, Mikheyev, Ferland, Hughes, Ekman-Larsson, Poolman, Schenn, Stillman, Burroughs, Rathbone, Myers, Dermott, Demko, Martin), minus Di Giuseppe and Plasek, the Canucks were close but not with 26 players and a cap hit of $86,027,917 (adjusting for Jaroslav Halak’s bonus excesses and the two buyout penalties). all Perfect.

Putting Mikheyev, Myers and Dermott on IR (requiring a seven-day absence that can be backdated to the offseason) drops the Canucks to a legal active roster size of 23 but doesn’t affect the cap.

Somehow, the Canucks had to pay off that excess $27,917.

Appearance: Danila Klimovich.

Linus Karlsson’s cap hit? $883,750.

Cap hit by Danila Klimovich? $855,833.

A quick visit to the calculator app shows you that the difference between these two amounts is exactly $27,917.

Perfect.

It’s a number so specific you’d think the team should have planned it when signing the contracts, although that would be impossible without some sort of fortune teller.

So the Canucks sent Karlsson down and called Klimovich, bringing their roster to 23 players and a cap hit of exactly $86,000,000.

As a final step, they placed Ferland on LTIR, invoked the formula above, and ended up with a salary relief pool of exactly Ferland’s $3.5 million, the most they could have gotten out of his contract.

You can now exceed the full-season salary cap by the full $3.5 million, or spend a total of $86 million all at once (a number that includes Ferland).

With Ferland on the LTIR, the Canucks start at 22 players (13F, 7D, 2G), albeit absolutely no headroom as far as the canopy is concerned. Essentially, what they’ve done is regain full use of the maximum cap space of $82.5 million, and they are using it to the full. Luckily, if Di Giuseppe is out long-term, his $146,250 SOIR hit will also add to the $3.5 million in relief. Assuming that happens Wednesday, that extra bit of space is all it would take the Canucks to trade Klimovich back to Karlsson, though Karlsson is now adding his potential $82,500 in performance bonuses to his cap hit. Further views require further placements on LTIR.

The Canucks also end up with a performance bonus pool of $2,165,000, an amount that should be manageable given their sudden maneuverability.

It was, we cannot stress enough, an absolute master class in cap management. The perfect shot. Everything from the exchange between Riley Stillman and Jason Dickinson to the number of days Di Giuseppe spent on the list helped nail this so hard, and they pulled it off.

Kudos and praise goes to the Canucks’ entire front office, with the first and probably loudest AGM going to Émilie Castonguay, a former agent who was hired because of her deep understanding of NHL contract law and has now delivered clearly.

With the Canucks leadership team trumping even Toronto’s Kyle Dubas and Tampa Bay’s Julien BriseBois, we can only tip our hats (pun intended).