Welcome back my CapFriendlies! Stop me if you've heard this before, but last week Mark Stone was put onto long term injured reserve. This sparked a discussion in my main fantasy league's chat and of course on Twitter where everyone is always completely rational. So, let's talk all things LTIR!

I have to say, sorry for all those out there who were rostering Mark Stone in fantasy this season. It's sort of an up and down season for him, and while I think most of that was centre-dependent, he had been starting to heat up before his injury with four points in six games. When his injury was announced, of course speculation began to spread if this was just Vegas's way of circumnavigating the salary cap as playoffs are a little over a month away, and to some degree maybe that's true, but the report is that Stone was dealing with a lacerated spleen. First off here, is there any other word in the English language that just sounds more painful than "lacerated"? Maybe not, but this is a week-to-week injury so of course Vegas did what they had to do which is put Stone onto LTIR.

Off the bat we need to go into how long one must remain on LTIR in order to qualify and that is you are expected to miss 10 games AND 24 days. So, if a club plays ten games in less time or vice versa that player must remain on LTIR. This designation also allows a club to exceed the salary cap, it doesn't nessisarily pull the money off a club's cap per say nor does this grant a club additional salary cap space but does offer relief in what's referred to as LTIR pool. How this is figured is by subtracting the amount of cap space the club had at the start of the season from the player's cap hit when they are placed on IR. Without getting too far into the weeds here, this is why a fair amount of paper transactions occur befoe the season were to begin if a club is balancing salary cap and LTIR questions that are upcoming to try and avoid any wasted salary space. You can't have a negative LTIR pool which would happen if you were to assign players to LTIR prior to the season, instead these take place following the start of the regular season to modify the clubs cap hit.

So now that we've gone over that, let's go back to Vegas…or maybe even further. Let's go back to the poster child of using LTIR prior to playoffs and that's the Tampa Bay Lightning. Tampa is one of the smartest organizations we have in the game so typically any transaction that they make I sort of blindly follow. So, Nikita Kucherov not playing a game in the 2021-'22 regular season to come back for the playoffs to net 27pts in 23 games. Sure, brilliant. A lot of people forget too, that same year Steven Stamkos was assigned to LTIR right before trade deadline to help the club out as well. I know this club got a lot of heat for using LTIR for relief than bringing key pieces back for playoffs where the salary cap does not apply, but this wasn't the first club to do it. Let's go back to 2015. The top song in America was…maybe Uptown Funk? Gas prices were much lower than they are right now, and Patrick Kane has just broken his collar bone. Simpler times, really. Immediate thought when this happened was good on you Patrick Sharp for coming right in and throwing jabs at Alex Petrovc, but following the news of a broken collar bone, my thought was the 'Hawks could use this as a chance to add pieces to a club that could go far come playoffs.

Turning things back to where we are now, Tampa got a lot of flak for navigating the cap like they did and seemingly Vegas did as well last season, and now looks to gete more this season (even with what sounds like a truly week-to-week injury for Stone). Let's take a step back here though, sure Vegas used LTIR for relief prior to playoffs last season before activating everyone, but this club was still under the salary cap when they eventually hoisted the Stanley Cup, and I don't think a lot of people realize that. That goes along with Vegas becoming the first club in the salary cap era to win the Cup with a player carrying a $10M AAV against the cap.

I get the argument here, maybe clubs are really abusing LTIR before playoffs, but I'd argue that it’s still good for the use that it's needed to have here. I'm not rushing an injured player back to the ice if I don't need to do so and would rather watch the best version of talented players come playoffs. There was a conversation that was held at the NHL GM meetings last year about trying to implement a soft salary cap come playoffs and I was curious why the GMs would want to bring that issue before the league. Rememeber, every year 32 (or thereabouts) NHL GMs complain about how low the cap is, only for most of them to spend right up to the ceiling, so why look to to impliment a soft cap for playoffs?  It's an interesting subject to see just where this all goes but with the rules that we have in place this will be status quo for the time being.

*Salary Cap data from CapFriendly.com

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