Spending Spree Time: An early look at the Ducks’ cap situation for 2022-23
Credit: NHL.com
Happy Salary Cap New Year to all who celebrate! Yesterday, the indispensable website CapFriendly, which provides detailed information about NHL contracts and salary cap numbers, was updated to make the upcoming 2022-23 NHL season the current year. This means it’s a great time to take an early look into what the Anaheim Ducks and new General Manager Pat Verbeek have to work with as we approach the NHL Entry Draft on July 7th and 8th in Montreal.
The cap's upper limit has increased by $1 million, from $81.5 million in 2021-22 to $82.5 million in 2022-23. This likely isn’t going to affect the Ducks all that much, since, as of this moment, the Ducks are $39,423,333 under the cap, the second most room of any team in the league besides the Buffalo Sabres. This gives Pat Verbeek and Assistant General Manager Jeff Solomon (whose primary responsibility is cap management) a plethora of options.
Now, that $39 million is going to get smaller since Anaheim has four restricted free agents they need to sign, and three of them have arbitration rights. Those players are Sonny Milano, Sam Steel, and Isac Lundestrom. This means that all three players have the right to defer to a neutral arbiter in the event they do not agree to the Ducks’ contract offer as a form of leverage in negotiations. The only RFA that doesn’t have arbitration rights is Urho Vaakanainen, who will have to exclusively negotiate with the Ducks and no one else.
Looking at this list of players, it’s pretty clear that none will be getting significant raises. Despite having somewhat of a breakout season, Milano only had 34 points thanks to missed time due to injury and inconsistent linemates and playing time. Lundestrom was a bit of a traditional hockey man favorite thanks to a career-high 16 goals as well as plenty of penalty kill time and tough defensive assignments but was still not a particularly high-impact player. And Sam Steel was Sam Steel.
It’s tough to see any of these RFAs getting significant raises. Evolving Hockey (subscribe to them, it’s easily worth the money), which just launched their incredibly valuable contract projection tool, agrees. Their work has proven to be probably the most accurate contract projection model in the public sphere in recent years. This is what they project all four RFAs will get:
Evolving Hockey projects that the most likely outcome is the Ducks adding about $7.6 million to their 2022-23 payroll thanks to these RFAs, which would bring their total cap from the current $43,076,667 to roughly $50 million, give or take a few million.
Now here comes the fun part: the Ducks have to spend more this offseason. Quite a bit more, actually. And that’s not just my opinion. For 2022-23, the cap floor (the minimum amount of money an NHL team has to have on their cap hit) is $61 million. Working off the Evolving Hockey projections for Anaheim after handing out RFA deals, the Ducks will need to add at least $11 million to their payroll for next season alone in order to be cap compliant before the season begins in October.
There are obviously a lot of ways this can be done. On the free-agent signing side, maybe a Kevin Fiala trade and extension. Evolving Hockey projects his new cap hit at $9.44 million. Unrestricted free agents Johnny Gaudreau or Filip Forsberg are both incredibly enticing targets for an Anaheim team that is getting close to playoff contention, with projections of $10.87 million AAV and $9.458 million AAV, respectively. These are the kinds of moves that have Verbeek signaling to the world that he’s ready for the Ducks to start competing. This is a situation not unlike what LA Kings General Manager Rob Blake found himself in last year when he decided to start adding pieces like Philip Danault and Viktor Arvidsson, among others.
Another route, if Verbeek isn’t entirely ready to go full speed towards playoff contention yet, is using that space to take on bad money deals from other teams in exchange for premium assets. Former Ducks General Manager Bob Murray did this when he took on David Backes’s contract for a first-round pick (and Ondrej Kase, but that’s an entirely different conversation). Verbeek did this last season with Zach Aston-Reese and John Moore at the deadline as cap relief moves intended to improve the returns of now-traded vets Hampus Lindholm and Rickard Rakell. He also attempted to do this with the now much-memed failed Evgenii Dadonov deal with the Vegas Golden Knights. Shea Weber’s contract could be a candidate for this kind of move, given the fact that his playing career is effectively over and that Montreal Canadiens GM Kent Hughes has said that he is actively trying to move the $7.857 AAV deal with four years remaining.
Another option is re-signing some of the depth pieces from last year like Aston-Reese and Dominik Simon, though these deals won’t be expensive (Evolving Hockey projects Aston-Reese at a $2 million AAV and Simon at a $822,600 AAV), putting more of a small dent into the available space rather than a significant impact.
Now, I know what you’re thinking, since the people who read Crash The Pond are incredibly intelligent hockey fans who know what they’re talking about. What about getting extensions done with the young stars like Trevor Zegras, Troy Terry, and Jamie Drysdale?
Great question! Thanks for asking!
Getting these extensions done this offseason would probably be a good idea, and I’m definitely in favor of it. But this article is more focused on the Ducks’ cap situation for 2022-23. All three of these players have one more year under contract before hitting RFA status, so any potential extensions would not impact the Ducks’ cap situation until the 2023-24 season. Which is important! But not what we’re focusing on right now. That’s a subject for another article.
The Anaheim Ducks are currently in an unfamiliar position, with more cap room than they have had in a long, long time. And considering that the team is going to need to spend at least $11 million for the upcoming season to hit the cap floor (not even taking into consideration the $20 million gap between the salary floor and ceiling that the Ducks can take advantage of), it’s safe to say that Pat Verbeek and company have set themselves up for plenty of options.
What’s clear is that the current Ducks roster is going to look different come October, based purely on the fact that they legally have to spend significant money to start playing next season. Whether they add through free agency, trades, or premium assets for taking on bad contracts, the possibilities are numerous and exciting.
Whether or not the rebuild is over is up to Verbeek, but it’s clear that this offseason will certainly be an interesting one in Anaheim, at least from a cap perspective.