Our Geoff Detweiler put together a fantastic look at today’s big move — the Flyers putting Ian Laperriere on long term injured reserve — and why this severely hurts the team going forward. In a nutshell, according to Geoff, the Flyers cannot call up anybody right now. They don’t have the cap space.
The Flyers are effectively as broke as my bank account right now. We’ll let Geoff explain, because he’s good with numbers.
The Flyers have been spending $4,071 more than the cap every day this year, but were able to do so because they had an LTIR cushion of $8,333 per day, due to Michael Leighton being on LTIR. With Leighton returning and Laperriere going on LTIR, they can now go over the salary cap by $6,272 per day. With the $4,071 in overages continuing – because nobody’s contract has been removed – the Flyers now can only increase their daily spending by $2,201.
The NHL’s league minimum salary for 2010-11 is $500,000. That’s equal to a $2,688 daily cap hit, or $487 more than the Flyers can afford.
With this move, the Flyers have effectively prevented themselves from being able to afford anybody not already on the roster.
There are a lot of numbers in there and it can be confusing, so lets try to boil it down. All of our numbers come from CapGeek.com, for the record.
You’re able to exceed the cap by as much money as you have on LTIR. Michael Leighton makes $1.55 million this season. Ian Laperriere makes $1.166 million this season. Notice that Laperriere makes less than Leighton and you can easily see where we’re going with this.
Simply put, the Flyers are only cap compliant thanks to the LTIR exception, and as it stands now, they cannot add one extra player. Even if that player makes the league minimum. The Flyers have an extra forward and an extra defenseman on the active roster right now, but if they need to call somebody up at any time, they cannot, as Geoff points out.
With a healthy scratch at each position currently (re: Oskars Bartulis and Nikolay Zherdev or Dan Carcillo), it might not be a problem, but the potential is obviously there. Essentially, they’ve put themselves between a rock and a hard place for absolutely no reason. That seems to be a theme lately.
As a result, the Flyers are broke. Make sure to read Geoff’s piece at SB Nation Philly for a full, detailed take, because there’s obviously a lot of nuance here.
