dirtygames.ca

These are, typically, the weeks of the year when nobody aside from true fanatics gives more than a moment’s thought to games played on ice in cold arenas.

Normally, I would count myself among those who ignore hockey through the dog days of summer. However, since ’summer’ in this city so far can be justly summed up by a lot of rain, a severe lack of really nice spend-hours-hanging-out-in-the-sunshine days, parks filled with garbage and a baseball team intent on dealing the best pitcher in the game and making me hate them for all time … I miss hockey.

Like, Dear-God-is-it-October-yet miss it.

So I wasted an hour (and you can easily waste more than that on this excellent site) on capgeek.com, a site that calculates, well, pretty much anything you could ever want to know about NHL salaries, cap room, contract bonuses, roster spots, etc. It even lets you play with signings and trades and see how they’d fit under your favourite team’s proposed salary structure.

But the intricate wheeling and dealing you can imagine with this site isn’t the point. A quick glance at the overall salary cap picture is enough to make any fanatic smile — there’s a whole lot of movement still to come before the season starts.

The San Jose Sharks have 18 players on their roster for next year. They need five more just to ice a team, yet they have just $217,503 remaining under the cap, for a grand total of $43,501 per skater. Someone’s leaving San Jose, and that someone’s gotta be making at least $3-4 million per year. At least.

Meanwhile the Senators are right up against the cap, and will probably have to deal Dany Heatley and his $4-million cap hit. That’ll create some room, but unless they’re asking for rookies and draft picks in return, they can’t get fair value for Heatley because almost everyone else in his (theoretically) 40-50 goals per year class makes more than $4 million. They also only have 21 players signed, so it looks like, if Heatley goes, it will have to be in exchange for a package of three players who make no more than about $4.3 million between them. That, or the Sens have to dump someone else into the deal.

At the other end of the spectrum, not all of the teams with serious money left to spend are the poor cousins of the league. Yeah, the Islanders ($19,924,934 under the cap), Thrashers ($10,376,117), Blue Jackets ($11,460,141) and Coyotes ($14,730,751) probably won’t be spending that money. Mostly because their owners don’t have it.

But the Kings ($9,436,668), Stars ($10,543,334), Avalanche ($8,991,667) and, to a lesser extent, Canucks ($4,410,834) all have cash left to spend and teams with serious holes to plug.

I had thought, given that the salary cap is almost exactly the same as last year — and that teams had known for months it was likely to stay in that range — to see a feeding frenzy at the lower end of the pool, with guys looking to make in the $1-1.5 million range being courted by several teams.

But a look at the money still on the table in some markets combined with the need for some very solid teams to shed some talented players to get themselves under the cap might explain why free agency in the NHL is still very much a buyer’s market almost a month into the game.

If you’re the Dallas Stars, sitting there with a decent team on paper and a cool $10M in your pocket, are you going to rush to sign the likes of Alex Tanguay, Sergei Zubov, Mats Sundin or Robert Lang … when you might be able to wait a month or so and nab the likes of Heatley, Patrick Marleau, Brian Campbell or Christian Erhoff?

It’s a good time to be patient. The next 2-3 weeks — much to chagrin of those stuck in a wet, cloudy garbage strike rooting for whatever team Roy Halladay ends up pitching for — should be pretty quiet … followed by the sound of dominoes beginning to topple as training camp looms and the Sharks realize they can’t afford to staff their fourth line with anyone more expensive than Wal-Mart greeters.

That’s when shit will really hit the fan….