Blame Alfie - Free Agent Draft Fall Out

If Alfredsson hadn't put up 7 points the night before the draft:

• Iffy would have been behind FMJ in the standings


• Creepy (FMJ's pick) would have picked after Iffy


• Morrow would be in Iffy's roster (at $4.1M)


• Iffy wouldn't be thinking too much about Superdraft


• Leaker wouldn't be wishing he hadn't upgraded to Lecavalier

The Morrow Loophole

Officepools.com and NHLPA.com have Morrow at $2.2M. This is incorrect. The truth is here. The Superdraft2007 rules state "NHLPA salaries will be used for salaries. If for any reason, the NHLPA does not provide a salary, the commissioner will determine the salary from other sources." I guess that says it all. NHLPA was not used for players listed as "unsigned" (like Iginla was earlier in the season) or players not even listed within the NHLPA website (like most rookies). I have used other sources for those.

In the end, the rules of Superdraft are very clear. If a salary is listed in NHLPA website, it will be used. Period. Creepy is a dirtball. Period.

Next year, we will use this source for NHL player salaries. The reason is described here. NHLPA can bite Bettman's Ass.

On Creepy's Salary Cap

There is an error/oversight in the salary cap calculator that I have been publishing on the Superdraft Resources Page. It affects people who drop/buyout more than one player in a single week.

The rules on buyouts are, "Players can be bought-out (dropped) at any time. There will be a $5 fee to drop a player. There will be a salary cap penalty which will be the maximum of: one half the player's salary that remains for the year, or $0.45M."

Later in the season, drops become less effective because the $0.45 minimum is more likely to kick in, especially if you are dropping cheap players. It actually gets to the point where it doesn't make sense to drop some players.

There have been a few buyouts this year: Iffy - Bergeron, Williams; FMJ - Salo, Souray; Stadnicky - Nylander; Creepy - Lombardi, Bertuzzi, Ryan, Stempniak.

Only Creepy managed to drop multiple players in a single week. He did it twice in fact.

I went here for dinner tonight. (Stuffed Shrimp was awesome BTW.) I saw this shirt there. It inspired me to create a new salary cap spreadsheet, specially designed for Creepy Gump. If you check out the update, you will see that Creepy has a few extra columns just special for him.

This new version will be used for everyone next year. It calculates the buyout separately for each drop in a week. When Creepy tested his proposed moves on the old spreadsheet, he added the salaries for Ryan and Stempniak and the buyout column came to $0.45M, and nothing turned red. Per the rules, the minimum is $0.45M per player dropped. With the revised spreadsheet, there are some redness problems!

Taking a close look, you can see that if he keeps Ryan, he will pay him less for the remainder of the year than what his buyout would be if he drops him now. Dropping Ryan makes the redness worse.

Since there was an error in the spreadsheet, I believe that the best thing to do is to let Creepy re-evaluate his drops. It looks like the options to remove the redness are:

• maintain drops of Ryan and Stempniak plus drop a player worth at least $1.99M at an additional cost of $5
• do not drop Ryan - drop Stempniak plus drop a player worth at least $1.63M with no additional cost
• do not drop Ryan or Stempniak - drop a single player worth at least $1.91M with no additional cost

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If anyone sees a reason why this resolution is not fair, speak now.