How one NHL team acquired Hall of Famers that never played for them
Over the past decade the Arizona Coyotes have acquired an extensive list of current (and future) Hall of Fame talents, only to have none of them ever play a single game for the team.
The lack of games is not the result of bad luck.
It is by design.
They added another one to the list on Wednesday by acquiring Shea Weber from the Vegas Golden Knights in a minor under-the-radar trade that was easily missed.
Weber joins Marian Hossa, Pavel Datsyuk and Chris Pronger as Hall of Fame talents to join the Coyotes without ever actually playing in a single game for them.
Because the Coyotes consistently have one of the lowest payrolls in the NHL and have massive amounts of salary cap space every year, they have become the league's dumping ground for undesirable contracts that teams need to get rid of.
Here is how it works.
In the cases of Weber, Pronger, Datsyuk and Hossa, all of them were under contract for several more years even though their playing days in the league were over, either due to age (Pronger, Datsyuk) or injury (Weber, Hossa). That meant their contracts would become headaches for their current teams as the players never officially filed their retirement papers to continue collecting the money that was still owed to them on their contracts.
This is where the Coyotes come in.
In an effort to dump those remaining salary cap hits from their books, teams will call Arizona and offer them draft picks to take on the remainder of those contracts.
The Coyotes take the contracts in a paper transaction, put the players on the long-term injured list, and collect future draft picks for their trouble. They never have to give up anything in the trades, and it also costs them very little actual money because of the way the contracts are structured. Take Weber's deal as an example. Even though his salary cap hit for the next three years is over $7 million per season, he is only owed $3 million in total salary ($1 million per year) over that time because his contract was frontloaded when he signed it. The Coyotes can easily pay that remaining salary and place him on the injured list.
They basically bought a draft pick for a couple million bucks. That is how it has worked time and time again with the aforementioned Hall of Famers, and even lesser players (Dave Bolland, Andrew Ladd, Bryan Little) with similar contracts.
Longtime Coyotes beat writer Craig Morgan joked on Wednesday the team should lean into this and starting selling those jerseys in the team store. They would probably sell very well.
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