Entering March, the Blackhawks already looked like a team primed to use a buyout in the coming 2020 offseason.
The odds of that happening — whenever the 2020 offseason ends up taking place — have only increased in the past two months.
The NHL has already lost a significant chunk of revenue due to the season pause, and if the season is ultimately canceled or only somewhat resumed, that chunk will get even larger.
And since the salary cap is directly correlated to league revenues — it is technically half the upcoming season’s projected revenue, divided by 31 — that huge financial fallout could quickly spill down to the player’s pockets.
The Hawks were already looking at a salary cap crunch, even with the cap expected to rise from its current $81.5 million to the $84 million-$88 million range. If the cap stays around $81.5 million or barely increases, though, general manager Stan Bowman’s situation could get even more dire.
That could affect the Hawks’ ability to re-sign pending free agents like Dylan Strome, Dominik Kubalik and Corey Crawford, as explored in a column last month.
But it could also — alternately, or perhaps simultaneously — lead to one or two buyouts of Hawks players with years left on their contracts.
Under the standard buyout rules, which are complicated and highly variable but generally spread out a player’s expected cap hit over more years at a lower amount per year, the Hawks have two prime candidates: defenseman Olli Maatta and forward Zack Smith.
Maatta was acquired from the Penguins last summer to help fix the Hawks’ leaky back end, and didn’t have an outright bad debut season in Chicago, but nonetheless made little difference. He finished with 17 points and a 47.5 percent scoring chance ratio (per Natural Stat Trick) in 65 games.
He has two years remaining at an expensive $4 million cap hit, and it just so happens that his contract is very buyout-friendly at the moment: a buyout would result in a mere $680,000 cap hit for the next four years, per Capfriendly.
Smith was acquired from the Senators last summer while dumping the Artem Anisimov contract.
But Smith, too, is heavily overpaid (one year remaining at $3.25 million) for a slowing-down fourth-liner. He finished with 11 points and a team-worst 40.4 percent scoring chance ratio in 50 games, then was ruled out for the season with a back injury.
His contract is slightly less buyout-friendly than Maatta’s, but he’s also a far more expendable player. A buyout would create a cap hit slightly under $1.1 million for the next two seasons.
Meanwhile, the NHL could also look into offering compliance buyouts, which completely erase contracts from the books with no penalties. The league offered these in the 2013 and 2014 offseasons after the 2012-13 lockout stalled cap growth.
In this scenario, the choice would be clear for the Hawks: Brent Seabrook’s contract is an albatross, as he’s due $6.875 million for four more seasons.
Despite Seabrook’s admirable fight back from three surgeries this past winter, Bowman would be delusional not to use a compliance buyout on the one-time defensive stalwart.
A conventional buyout, however, remains impractical — most of Seabrook’s cap hit is packed into a signing bonus that cannot be mitigated in any way.
