So Let's Talk About What Happens If Shea Weber Retires Early Real Quick
**Jordie’s Disclaimer: Some of you might find this blog to be really interesting. Some of you might find this blog to be ridiculously boring. But for those of you who are stuck at work today and actually care about shit like this, I think it’ll help kill some time in the cube.**
So some more unfortunate news for the Montreal Canadiens today…
Shea Weber is now out for 5-6 months after having his 2nd surgery of the year. That has him coming back some time around December-January of this upcoming season. Now a lot of people say that Thanksgiving is usually the time when you can gauge which teams are playoff teams and which teams are not. But I think Christmas is usually the better spot in the season to really start counting teams out. And there is a damn good chance by the time that Shea Weber is ready to return next season that the Montreal Canadiens are already going to be very much out of the playoff picture. Especially if they’re able to trade Pacioretty this summer So I doubt they’ll be in any rush to get him back on the ice or anything if that’s the case. Which is actually a good thing for Shea Weber considering he is now 32-years-old, clearly starting to fall apart a little and it’s not like you start healing any faster once you hit 30.
But after two surgeries in the span of a few months, the fact that Weber is 32-years-old and the fact that he still has 8 years left on his contract? Well it’s probably time to at least start thinking about what happens if Shea Weber decides to shut it down early. Because this is one of the biggest pieces of the Weber/Subban trade that I think a lot of people tend to forget about.
The other day I wrote a blog talking about when the Flyers sent an offer sheet to Shea Weber in the 2012 free agency. It was a 14-year contract worth $110 million. An absolutely preposterous offer that Nashville decided to match. So with that offer, Shea Weber was locked under contract until 2026. Here are the details courtesy of CapFriendly.
Now as you see, the contract is front loaded as hell. While the cap hit remains the same throughout the entirety of the deal, you’ll see that most of the money was being made up through this year. Next year starts a little bit of a pay cut for Weber and in the final 4 years of his contract, he’ll be earning a total of $6 million. As opposed to the $64 million he made in the first 4 years. So now the NHL has a rule to penalize teams for front loading contracts like that and it’s called salary cap recapture. Now to people like myself, it’s confusing as shit. I’m sure that you numbers people out there understand it pretty easily but it’s like Chinese to me. But what happens in the case of the Weber/Subban trade is that the NHL looked at how much money Shea Weber made from 2013-2016 and compared it to how much the cap hit was. So he made $14 million in those 3 seasons which equaled up to $56 million total. His cap hit for those three seasons equaled up to $31,428,572. So you take that number, subtract it from the $56 and you come away with pretty much $24.5 million and change. That number becomes the penalty for Nashville.
So when does that penalty come into place? Well it all depends on if Shea Weber ends up retiring before his contract expires and if so, how many years are left on his contract. Because the Nashville Predators are going to be on the hook for that $24.5 million. And they have to pay that salary cap recapture penalty spread out across how many years are left on the deal. So let’s just call it an even 24 and say that Shea Weber retires with 4 years left on the deal. They’d have to pay $6 million for 4 years. But if Shea Weber retires with only 1 year left on his deal? They’d have to pay the full $24 right then and there. So if I’m the Nashville Predators right now, I’m starting to shit my pants a little with how Weber’s health seems to be trending.
Now none of this will mean anything if Weber doesn’t retire before 2025-26. And there’s probably a very strong chance that even if Shea Weber isn’t good/healthy enough to continue to play throughout that final season, he could always just be stashed away on LTIR until his deal is up. Then it would be the same situation as Chris Pronger going on LTIR with the Flyers and then having his contract get traded to the Coyotes to help them reach the salary cap floor. And that seems like it would be the most likely scenario here. But there are still 8 more damn years on that contract. That is such a long ways away. The John Tavares contract in Toronto will be up before Shea Weber’s current contract. So there is still a very real possibility that Weber could just say fuck it and retire at some point beforehand. In which case? I guess Montreal wins the trade finally.