Quoting: CMcAvoy73
I think signing someone and instantly trading them retained is more ridiculous than the kovalchuk deal.
I mean, we can agree to disagree, but having the last 35% of that deal pay out only 3% of the total salary was mind-boggling and just asking for trouble.
The thing I don't see is how Bettman can just wave this away as circumvention without facing some sort of blowback from the teams involved. Is this really that different than the Coyotes trading for Bryan Little's contract, fully knowing that the likelihood of him recovering from his injuries during the remaining 2 years on his deal is pretty much zero? It's still them taking on the cap hit of a player who will not put on a Coyotes sweater in order to get an asset out of another team for doing so; and if it's not expressly forbidden in the CBA I don't see how it can be just undone under Article 26.
Other leagues have provisions that would prevent this - both the MLB & NBA have periods where newly-signed players can *not* be traded after signing their new deals (typically about 2 and a half months into the regular season). Sign-and-trades in the NBA have been around since before the current CBA was agreed on, so the league acting like this concept would be beyond the pale would be silly and would be very unlikely to hold up in an arbitration or court setting. If a team decides taking on $10M over 2 years is worth 1st and a 4th at the deadline, why wouldn't they have the same right to do so at any time during that player's contract if it's not expressly spelled out in the CBA?
And again, there are not that many opportunities for *this* type of sign and trade to happen - teams can only be retaining on 3 deals at once, and they can only retain on half the deal. There are only a few teams in the league I'd consider "floor teams" that would have any interest in doing this type of deal, so you're realistically looking at a maximum of 4-5 happening in an offseason.