Correction: It turns out that over-35 contract rules do, in fact, supersede and not combine with the new $900,000 waiver threshold.
Therefore, even though Andreas Lilja's cap hit of $737,500 is below the threshold, the Flyers are still on the hook for $637,500 of cap space for him while he is in the AHL.
The Flyers issued corrected information after initially saying there was no cap hit on Lilja.
Roster Moves and Roster Battles
Yesterday, the Flyers placed
Andreas Lilja and
Brian Boucher on waivers for purpose of assigning them to the Adirondack Phantoms. With the elimination of the recall waiver rule that existed under the old CBA, the Flyers would be able to bring either player back at a moment's notice in case of injury on the NHL club.
There had been some confusion the past two days on whether the Flyers would incur a cap hit on Lilja if he were sent to the AHL. The league's over-35 contract rules state that a player on an over-35 contract who is waived will still have his full cap hit minus $100,000 charged against the team's cap. This rule has carried over to the terms of the new Collective Bargaining Agreement.
However, there is also a new waiver rule place -- one geared toward preventing the stashing of bad contracts in the AHL -- that sets a cap-hit threshold ($900,000 for the 2012-13 season) -- that can be buried in the minor league with zero cap penalty. This new rule also affects the over-35 waiver rules. In the case of Lilja, it does so in a positive way for the Flyers.
Flyers assistant general manager
Barry Hanrahan, who deals exclusively with salary cap management, confirmed yesterday that because Lilja's NHL cap hit is just $737,500, he can be waived and sent to the AHL without cap penalty. Incidentally, Lilja's real-dollar salary for the season is $700,000.
Unlike most of the Flyers players, Lilja is being paid nearly in full this season due to pre-lockout hip surgery. For that reason, he collected his normal checks through the fall before being medically cleared in December.
No one would ever publicly admit to this, of course, but I suspect that the Flyers' late summer pronouncement that Lilja would be ready to play by late October to early November -- despite Lilja's doctor's timetable of him being ready in December and the player explicitly saying as such to the Swedish press-- had at least something to do with the team's payment obligations during the impending lockout.
As it turned out, Lilja's doctor's timetable proved to be the correct one. The Flyers, to their credit, never really pushed the issue. He was not rushed, despite the initial pronouncement of him being ready to be cleared about six weeks before he actually was.
The decision to waive Lilja was a numbers issue. It's not that he's not still a serviceable seventh defenseman. I thought he did last year what the Flyers signed him to do. He filled in as needed in the starting lineup, dressing in 46 regular season games (despite a high ankle sprain that caused him to miss a month) and 10 playoff games. He kept his game very simple, blocked his share of shots and was not a major liability despite his suspect mobility and lack of offensive skills.
With the off-season signing of
Bruno Gervais and the recent addition of
Kurtis Foster, Lilja fell to eighth on the depth chart. The writing was on the wall that he'd be waived and sent to the Phantoms once he clears.
Boucher will carry a $50,000 cap hit for the Flyers while he plays with the Phantoms. As I wrote the other day, he is basically an insurance policy on an injury to either
Ilya Bryzgalov or
Michael Leighton. He is already in Glens Falls.
Yesterday, the Flyers also sent second-year pro
Tye McGinn to the Phantoms. That was also a foregone conclusion, as McGinn did not get much of a look in the abbreviated NHL camp. Mainly, he was being evaluated as a potential call-up once the season starts. He never really figured to be given a shot at breaking camp with the NHL squad, especially given the absence of exhibition games.
Heading into the season, the Flyers could carry one to two spare forwards on their roster.
Scott Laughton is likely to get a five-game regular season look with the big club, overlapping at least in part with
Danny Briere missing the start of the season due to a hairline wrist fracture.
Zac Rinaldo has the 11th forward forward slot sewn up, and has skated exclusively among the regular starters during camp.
That leaves one or two open spots once Briere returns. There is a battle among
Eric Wellwood,
Jody Shelley and
Tom Sestito for the final spot(s).
Wellwood has spent part of the camp skating on the "fifth line" at practice but has also regularly been used in a penalty killing role during the daily special teams practices that comprise the bulk of the second session. He is still on an entry-level contract, which makes him waiver exempt.
Sestito, who has been working to get back to full strength after recovering from the mumps, would require waivers to send to Adirondack. However, he cleared waivers a year ago and there would be no cap penalty this year if he went down to the AHL again.
If Shelley makes the team, it will be as the 13th forward. If the enforcer is retained at the NHL level for the final year of his contract -- and I think he will be, or else he'd have been waived along with Lilja yesterday -- it will be mainly for his presence in the locker room and the role he plays during practices (where he skates as both a forward and a fill-in "defenseman" as needed). If the Flyers were to send Shelley to the AHL, they would still have $200,000 of his $1.1 million salary applied to their cap.
My gut feeling on what will happen: Wellwood scrapes by and makes the team as a fourth line player based on his speed and penalty killing role. Shelley will be the seldom-used 13th forward. That would mean Sestito gets waived -- a potential opportunity to get claimed and placed immediately in the NHL or else competing at the AHL level with McGinn for a call-up opportunity.
Personally, I like Sestito. I think he can have an NHL role as a big crash-and-bang forward who also drops the gloves and scratches out a few goals with his size and underrated hands around the net. He's much younger, cheaper and more naturally talented that Shelley. But Sestito is also lacking a bit in some of the intangibles that Shelley brings. I'll put it this way: Jody Shelley has 626 NHL games to his credit. Sestito has a lot of work to do to someday get to even half that number (he's at 27 career NHL games at age 25).
In Wellwood's case, the player is on the bubble because he had a poor AHL season with the Phantoms during the lockout and is still a beat weak physically in addition to being undersized height-wise.
Terry Murray wanted to see him be more assertive and that didn't happen until the tail end of his stint in the AHL this season.
Heading into the start of the Phantoms' season, I actually thought that Wellwood would be the type of player that the defense-first Murray would take a shine to. Instead he ended up as a healthy scratch on several occasions. But I think Murray wanted to see Wellwood challenge himself more to be a tone-setting player at the AHL level rather than being just a defensively aware role player with a go-with-the-flow style.
It's no secret that Wellwood does not have the hands of his brother, Kyle. But he did manage five goals for the Flyers in 24 regular season games last year, and then dressed in every playoff game last year.
Peter Laviolette clearly saw something he liked, and it had a lot to do with Wellwood's fleet feet.
Some people have questioned Murray's handling of personnel with Adirondack this year. I can understand why he's been second-guessed. However, what I think people are missing is that Murray had a specific set of goals and expectations for every player and he has not deviated from that plan.
Jason Akeson was sent to Trenton at the start of the year because Murray wanted to see him improve his skating and two-way play.
Marcel Noebels and fellow rookies
Matt Mangene and
Andrew Johnston went to the ECHL for ice time in a variety of game situations -- a means of preparation for greater AHL ice time and responsibility when the NHL lockout eventually came to an end.
In the case of players like Wellwood and
Matt Ford who ended up as healthy scratches in Murray's AHL doghouse, there was a preseason expectation that these players would immediately step up into positive tone-setting roles in support of
Brayden Schenn and
Sean Couturier. McGinn did just that and got rewarded with a lot of ice time. Wellwood and Ford did not, nor did
Shane Harper or
Mike Testwuide.
Yes, Murray has been very tough to please -- almost unrealistically so in some case. Yes, it's worked to the detriment of Adirondack's already suspect depth up front. I'm not being an apologist here. I'm trying to explain what I think was the rationale behind the way players have gotten handled.
Murray stated very clearly during the Phantoms camp in Voorhees that his mission with the Phantoms was to teach their players what is needed to be an NHL player, while giving the guys who were already in the NHL a chance to be the Phantoms' team leaders in all game situations. He hasn't deviated from that tough-love approach, even when it seemed like there were more players in his doghouse than in his good graces.
There were times where it felt like, if he could, Murray would have dressed just the six forwards -- one scoring line and one checking line -- and four to five defensemen (and that was before
Erik Gustafsson and
Marc-Andre Bourdon went down) in whom he trusted. Instead, he just shuffled the remaining bodies around according to which guys were deeper in the doghouse and which ones had picked up the tempo in practice the last few days.
Wellwood fell short of Murray's rather ambitious expectations for several months but eventually finished out strong. I'm hopeful that carries over back to the NHL. Meanwhile, Rinaldo pretty much ran with the ball in whatever task that Murray assigned him. I know that Rinaldo wanted to see a little more scoring-line time to show he actually has some skills but he still made the most of the penalty killing chances he's been begging for.
That go-for-it sort of moxie and genuine hunger to play a bigger role is why Rinaldo became one of Murray's favorites. It's why Laviolette also likes Rinaldo, despite the penalties he takes.
Wellwood is a different sort of player, plays a different on-ice role and has a much less brash personality. But what he can emulate a little bit more is the way Rinaldo attacks the ice with gusto, whether it's practice or a shift in a 6-2 game. Coaches love that sort of thing, and that's the way Wellwood can stick in the NHL for the long haul.
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All available tickets to this evening's free-to-attend Flyers practice (which will be emceed by
Steve Coates) at the Wells Fargo Center were snapped up within 24 hours of being made available by the team. It starts at 6 p.m.
Frankly, I have no idea what to expect tonight, but I don't think it'll be able to be conducted like a typical up-tempo practice with little-to-no wasted time. From a hockey standpoint, I know that Laviolette and the other coaches would prefer to eliminate any distractions and side spectacles with less than 48 hours to go before the team's first game since last May.
But this evening's event has nothing to do with getting ready to play the Penguins on Saturday and the Sabres on Sunday. The event is all about the organization marketing a modicum of goodwill after the end of the lockout; an obligation that both the coaches and players alike understand.
Tonight's events, I'm sure, will also prominently feature newly appointed captain
Claude Giroux. Originally, the announcement of his captaincy was supposed to be "saved" for tonight but the news was such a poorly kept secret -- and had already been widely confirmed off the record to the point that everyone around the team would all but do a stage wink when publicly deflecting questions about which player would get the C.
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