If you’re not a fan of, say, American football, you have very little experience with salary caps. It’s taken me a while to figure it out, and I’m not clear on the subtleties. One important but poorly understood aspect of the NHL’s new cap is this: if you underspend early, you can overspend late in the season. Let the Hockey Rodent explain:
An alternative way of visualizing the integrals is to use poker chips, all the same value. The analogy being that the CBA says each club may not spend more than 234 chips per season, where each chip represents $1M in salary paid for one month.
New York is allocated 234 of these chips in September. Every month, Slats must ante up one chip for each $1M of Ranger payroll for that month.
Teams, therefore, would be wise to save some cap room for the trade deadline. After all, you can pick up a $4 million player for around $1 million, because there’s less than a quarter of the season left.
DarrenBarefoot.com 