You're not getting it. There would be no "complications" for the Habs. The complications would be on Nashville.
ME is probably right though, they would sooner trade for his right back and then pull the LTIR BS.
You're the one not getting it.
What you're referring to are the salary cap ramifications if Weber retires before his contract is over. I'm well aware of those, and that they would fall entirely on Nashville.
What I'm saying is that
Weber will not officially retire before his contract is over, because retiring before his contract is over doesn't benefit Weber at all. All it'd mean is that he loses out on money that's owed to him. And even if it's the $3M owed to him over the last three years of his deal, or the $6M owed to him over the last four years, why lose out on that money if he doesn't have to?
Instead, he'll go on LTIR, like every other one of these players, and collect all of the money owed to him. So the cap recapture penalties are a moot point.
And the specific "complications" I'm referring to are the same ones the Leafs have faced with Nathan Horton & Joffrey Lupul's contracts.
And it's nothing major, in most circumstances. A few examples off the top of my head:
- In order to access & use the cap room of a player on LTIR, you have to spend to the cap.
- LTIR cap room cannot be used towards rookie performance bonuses.
- You have to be very particular about when you put a player on LTIR in order to get the maximum cap benefit. So the Habs would need a capologist who's really on his game.
So, once Weber suffers his inevitable "career-ending injury/illness", most likely either when his contract dips down to $3M, or when it goes down to $1M the year after, the Habs will decide either to just keep Weber's contract on the books and deal with those little annoyances, or they'll pay some other team to take the contract off his hands.
But the one thing that's not going to happen is Weber retiring and leaving millions of dollars on the table for no reason.