Many die-hard Sharks fans already know that Torrey Mitchell broke his leg in training camp yesterday, but as one commenter put it in the last post, what does that mean for the Sharks salary-wise?  Sorry to keep posting about the CBA and salary cap rules, but this is really the most serious issue facing the Sharks going into this season.

First of all, as bcyde said, Mitchell can’t be put on Long-Term IR unless he’s out a much longer time, but I think that’s a red herring.  LTIR doesn’t really gain you cap relief, not really.   And yes, the ‘mepex’ in that comment thread is me.

So the Sharks have to bite another bullet, and find a way to replace Mitchell with a minimum of cap hit.  As grier responded in the last thread, this pretty much cuts out Logan Couture, Mike Moore, or Jamie McGinn.  And with Couture or McGinn, if they play 11 games or more, that counts as a ‘professional season’, which shortens their restricted free agency, and would count toward the 50-player SPC limit.  Sending those guys back to juniors is the right move here.

So look for a college or minor league player, like Zalewski or Mike Morris, to get a cup of coffee in the bigs.  And I agree with grier that as long as Friesen doesn’t tank camp or have some unreasonable contract demands, he’ll be on the opening day roster.

In other news, the Sharks signed John Ferguson Jr., the former GM of the Maple Leafs, as a scout.  Most people only know Ferguson as the guy who signed all his players to contracts with either no-trade or no-movement clauses, which put the Leafs over a barrel time and again.  By most accounts, JFJ is a capable scout, his crown jewel being the drafting of Daniel Alfredsson by the Sens in the 6th round of the 1994 draft.  As far as I’m concerned, if he’s a good scout, welcome aboard.  As long as they keep him away from the contract talks and personnel decisions, I’m happy.

Now that we know that Frankenstein and Rizz Part II (Plihal) are both in camp, we are further left to speculate on what the final roster will look like for our San Jose Sharks. It is curious that neither Semenov or Plihal’s contract has been made “official” by the NHLPA, most likely the contracts are both sitting on Doug Wilson’s desk. Semenov has scribbled the words “ME LIKE BRAINS” next to his name and Plihal wrote “I Love Healthy Scratch” and they are ready to fax….after Doug Wilson has figured out how the hell to get back under the NHL salary cap.

McLellan and Wilson have said that these moves would be made based on who earns a roster spot in camp, which is the right answer – so it is extremely possible that both The Monster and Plihal could get outplayed by a pair of rookies….say rookie camp standouts Steven Zalewksi or Mike Morris or perhaps Doug Joslin will step up finally and earn a spot……and then Puttin’ on the Ritz and Thomas P. end up in Worcester. I have to assume that their contacts are two-way deals.

There are several questions going into camp. We will address those in more depth in the coming days on the podcast and here. Doug Wilson is going to have at least one more move up his sleeve in the coming weeks to get under the cap….and it’s anyone’s guess what it will be. Will it be the obvious casualty, Kyle McLaren and his 2.5M? If Couture, Zalewski and Morris shine in camp, could Michalek be the Shark shown the door to get back coveted prospects/1st round pick? Will a training camp injury make the decision that much easier….I think we’ve learned that sometimes with DW, the obvious move isn’t always the move he’s got plotted out. It’s anyone’s guess at this point.

Lucky 13 here.  I want to again thank our regular emailers for providing much needed topics and content for the show, and I renew our call to our readers here and other listeners (you know who you are) to email us, and let us know what you think of the show, or what you want us to talk about.

Ok, enough begging (I refuse to use the term bleg).  We touched a little on the rookie camp in this episode, and tried to break down the Mathieu Schneider situation as best we could, and contrasted it a bit with the unfortunate pickle McLaren is in.   The season preview continues with the Atlantic division.

Now on to Schneider schadenfreude.  First off, I can’t believe no one else has used those two words together yet, because in my mind, it’s like Hall and Oates, Calvin and Hobbes, Kibbles and Bits.  Anyway, because I fancy myself a bit of a capologist, here’s my breakdown:

• Schneider was over 35 when he signed his current deal with the Ducks, and thus falls into a special category.
• That category states that if the Ducks waive him, or he retires, even due to injury, his salary still counts against the cap.  This isn’t the case for players that signed their deals when they were younger than 35.  This also explains why Roenick is on a series of one-year deals.
• Signing a 37 year old guy to a two year deal for almost $12M was, not to put too fine a point on it, stupid.  I’ll take bets right now that if Sundin signs a multi-year deal that (equally stupid) team will be in the same jam in a year’s time.
• By waiving him, the Ducks make his contract available to anyone who wants to take it.  If someone does claim him, the Ducks are off the hook.  To our glee so far, that hasn’t happened.  It’s been reported that the Kings, seemingly a likely candidate, will probably not claim him.
• If and when our eerily-white-toothed hero clears waivers, the Ducks could send him to the minors, but that wouldn’t provide any cap relief either.
• One possible play for the Ducks is to bring him back to the team at that point, through a process called “re-entry waivers”, which again makes Schneider available to anyone, but this time, at half the price.  The Ducks will be on the hook for the other half, and wouldn’t really solve their cap problem.
• This is where my limited expertise ends.  If the Ducks don’t bring him back through re-entry waivers, can other teams sign him, and then he gets paid by both teams?  I know some players get paid by two teams because of a buyout, like Darcy Tucker, but this is different.  Anyone know?

It’s fun watching Brian Burke squirm.  You can almost taste how badly they want to sign Selanne, but they can’t until Schneider is gone, or other cap-clearing moves are made.

Two things you don’t expect to hear in the same sentence are hockey and public radio.  But the most recent episode of “This American Life” (episode available on mp3 until next week) opens the episode titled “The Enforcers” with one of the most fearsome enforcers of all time, Joe Kocur.  The hockey stuff really only lasts 4 minutes or so, but it’s worth a listen.  Not really illuminating, especially if you read The Code, but hell, what else do you have to do?

On a scale of 1 to 10, how sad is it that I listen to a show on NPR?  Don’t answer that.

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Semenov signed.

New podcast here.  We’ve begun our season preview- in this episode, we talk about the Southeast and the Northeast.  Every show from here to the beginning of the season we’ll be doing one division, with the Pacific last.  However, we’ll be dealing with regular Sharks topics every show, as we always have.  If you want us to talk about anything in particular, drop us a line.

Apropos to none of this, I went and bought NHL09 for XBOX360 today.  I honestly haven’t spent any time playing a hockey video game since NHL’94, which I played on my PC.  That was back when the Sharks were bad, and I split my allegiance between the Sharks and Devils.  In my computer-generated season, I had over 100 goals with Bernie Nicholls.  Much has been made of how dominant JR was in that game, but good old Bernie wasn’t so bad either.  Plus, how many players do you know that had a goal celebration named after them?  Pumper-Nicholl, baby!

As many Sharks fans know, the Sharks are currently over the 2008-09 salary cap by about 226K.  There’s been much speculation about who might get traded or otherwise dumped.  As we written before in this space and mentioned in the podcast, Kyle McLaren is the most likely choice to go, for two reasons.  One is his $2.5M contract would easily bring the Sharks under the limit and provide a little bit of room to boot; the second being with the off-season acquisitions of three defensemen, Big Mac is probably going to be on third pairing detail.  Pollak blogged about it today, and it got me thinking- is there a way for the Sharks to keep McLaren?

Actually, there is.  First of all, according to NHLSCAP.com, “…from July 1 to the last day of training camp, teams may exceed the Upper Limit by no more than 10%.”  This means the Sharks don’t have to do any juggling or trading until after camp begins, allowing the team to evaluate some young players.  Currently, according to the Hockeybuzz Cap Central (powered by nhlscap.com), the Sharks have 21 guys on the roster.  Let’s say the Sharks then bring up a young guy, maybe Cavanaugh, maybe Zalewski or Joslin, for a cost of around $600K.  This means the Sharks are about $800K over.

To fully understand what I’m about to posit, know that the cap is actually calculated on a daily  basis- $56.7M divided by 186 days in the season (postseason doesn’t count) means the Sharks can spend $304,839 per day on salaries.  At $800K over the cap for the course of the entire season, this means they are over $4301 per day in salary.

Coupled with waiver wire rules, where certain young players don’t have to clear waivers (like Devin Setoguchi) the Sharks could send players down to Worchester in order to clear the room.  For instance, sending Seto down for a day would save the Sharks $6702, putting them under the cap.  The Sharks still have to actually pay the money to Seto, but they are within the cap rules.  Seto hasn’t played enough games where he has to clear waivers, so he could be a candidate for shuffling.  Any other young untested players would be in a similar situation.

Another candidate would be Marcel Goc.  He would have to clear waivers, and would be vulnerable to the Sharks losing him, but his salary would be about enough to put the Sharks under the cap.

The final option would be something we’ve seen the Sharks do before, have a player be ‘injured’ and then send him to Worchester for ‘conditioning’.  These conditioning assignments are also waiver-exempt.

Are any of these scenarios very good?  Not even close.  But if the Sharks are in trade talks with a team as the season starts, one or more of these tactics could enable San Jose to dance on the razor’s edge of salary cap compliance.  Hopefully for only a week or two, but if there is a sequence of injuries to say, oh, I don’t know, McLaren, Lukowich, Grier, and Shelley, the Sharks could theoretically skate (har) the entire season.

Let’s hope that doesn’t happen.

Here.  As always, we are looking for new bits and ideas, so if you have any, email us.  Even if you just have feedback either way, or are looking to get out of a Nigerian banking jam, drop us a line.

Anybody watch “The Hockey Show” on nhl.com?  I was just starved for hockey anything, as I’ve been for the past month, and actually went to the league’s home page, as opposed to the news sites I generally frequent.  Lo and behold, there’s a TV type show that the league puts out every day, complete with eye candy hostess and lack of interesting content (other than the eye candy hostess, of course).  In today’s episode, there was a video segment of Kirk Maltby’s day with the Cup, a mildly interesting story, even on such a slow news day.

This will be the fourth time Maltby has had a Cup day, and I guess he used up all his good ideas on the other three.  The segment includes Kirk taking the best trophy in sports to not one, but TWO nail salons and a pet groomer.  Jeez man, that’s all you could come up with, heading over to your wife’s workplace and where the dog gets the matted poop cut out of his fur?  It’s supposedly the first part of a two part series, and to make up for this sissy crap I hope he takes the Cup that night to a dozen whorehouses and a UFC title fight.  Weak, Maltby.

Somehow, I couldn’t get past that segment enough to watch the other segments- “Athletes against Autism”, “Islanders Ice Girls”, and “Ace of Cakes.”  Ok, I watched the Ice Girls segement.  Can’t the season just start already?

Breaking news today when the Sharks announced the contract extension of pending RFA and now poster boy for the Sharks young defensive core, Marc-Eduoard Vlasic. With exact contract terms of his four year deal not released by the Sharks and no info to be found at my usual sources, but if I had to guess (and I’m going to) I would say it is a slight improvement to Ehrhoff’s deal because of the major minutes Vlasic will asked to log this season and in the future. So I’m saying four years, 14M – at an average of 3.5M per season.

So should Mike rush out and buy his Vlasic jersey or will we see the “Matt Carle Effect” here? Is Vlasic going to crumble under the pressure of his new deal and lay a big steamer on the blueline? Will Doug Wilson be forced to package Pickles in the offseason to get a veteran D-man to take up the slack. No, no and no. Pickles isn’t in the same situation Carle was in last year and is signing the extension as a more proven NHL player with 163 NHL games under his skates who has already shouldered a major role on a playoff team…which Carle hadn’t really done when he signed his extension and still hasn’t done yet with any consistentcy.

Another great move by DW, setting up the Sharks to win a Stanley Cup today and contend for years to come. When does the season start again?? SHARKS!!!!

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