The important thing is the extra year or two before he gets a new contract. That small amount of difference in the eventual cap hit should the player hit the NHL while on his ELC is not significant. Timothy Liljegren via Cap Friendly SEASON Only the base salary and performance bonus portions of a contract slide. For this reason, you should expect Durzi to sign just as he’s about to join the Marlies and not before. Meanwhile Sean Durzi, should he sign a contract right now, would not be eligible to slide, no matter where he played, because he turns 20 later this year. He won’t play in the NHL this year so while that contract would normally expire in the summer of 2021, we can safely assume it will run to at least 2022. Some examples: Rasmus Sandin just signed his ELC. What that means is that if a player appears in his 10th game, his contract can’t slide.Ī slide is where the ELC pushes forward a year, and the cost control over the player is extended by the team while he’s in the minors or still in junior hockey.įor a contract to slide, the player must be 18 or 19 at the time he signs the ELC and cannot be about to turn 20 in that calendar year. That’s the way it’s often phrased, anyway. That is, that when a rookie plays more than nine games in the NHL that season counts against his contract. Now for the bonus content: contract slides and how they interact with the signing bonus. Matt Martin and Jonathan Bernier have both been dealt by the Leafs after they paid a signing bonus. The other side of the coin is that a contract, particularly one with a diminishing cash salary amount that has large signing bonuses, makes for an easier trade in the final years of the deal. It doesn’t matter what nonsense the NHL gets up to ever, the most salary Tavares can ever lose in one year is less than a million. Since signing bonuses are paid in July, they also partially “lockout proof” a contract. The sheer scale of the bonus to salary ratio in Tavares’s deal likely makes his the most buyout proof contract ever.

Both John Tavares and Ilya Kovalchuk have contracts dramatically weighted to signing bonuses. It would be very unusual for a top draft pick to not have a contract structured that way.Īside from a lovely bit of cash to spend every July (even players in the NHL get no salary outside the regular season other than the signing bonus payment), the purpose of signing bonuses is multi-faceted.Īs said, the amount is left off a buyout calculation, so big signing bonuses are a way to “buyout proof” a contract. Nearly every player on an ELC in the NHL has a signing bonus, and a lot of them are at the max amount. They are paid out in a lump sum in the summer, and the amount is not included in buyout calculations. Signing bonuses are part of the salary, count as part of a player’s cap hit, and are capped at $92,500 for players on ELCs. There are two main types of bonuses: Signing Bonuses To that end, I have a short primer on contract bonuses to jog your memory.

It’s a lot more fun remembering how many goals Auston Matthews scored in his first game than how the CBA works.

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