When’s It Realistic for Sharks to Buy Out Big Contracts? | SJHN+

How do you get rid of a contract?

That’s something we began exploring yesterday, because the San Jose Sharks have five contracts seven years or longer: Evander Kane, Logan Couture, Brent Burns, Marc-Edouard Vlasic, and Erik Karlsson’s.

Looking at 65 contracts of similar length, going all the way back to 2005-06, we found five ways that teams cut bait: The players complete the contract on the same team — trade, buyout, retirement, or Long-Term Injured Reserve (LTIR) are other options.

We examined trends in Retirement, Completion, and LTIR yesterday — today, let’s look at buyouts.

Is it realistic for the San Jose Sharks buy out Kane, Couture, Burns, Vlasic, or Karlsson any time soon?

Before we get to that, let’s remember these key buyout rules:

For the purposes of this conversation, we’re going to concentrate on the second rule, because the 1/3 rule doesn’t apply to these Sharks. We’re also going to ignore amnesty/ compliance buyouts — these were offered after the 2012-13 lockout and were buyouts that didn’t carry a cap penalty.

I bet Doug Wilson would kill for an amnesty buyout or two right now.

But back to reality: Per CapFriendly, there have been 122 non-compliance, 26-or-older buyouts since 2005-06.

There have only been two cases of teams buying out veterans with four years left on their contracts: Kyle Turris in October 2020 and Alexei Yashin in June 2007. Four years is the longest remaining term on a non-compliance buyout in NHL history.

The cap hit penalty, of course, is spread over double the remaining term: So the Predators will be punished by the Turris misstep for eight years, until 2027-28.

Trailing that, there have been just nine examples of organizations buying out players with three seasons to go on their deals: Justin Abdelkader and Jack Johnson in October 2020, Dan Girardi in June 2017, Stephen Weiss and Alexander Semin in June 2015, Mike Ribeiro in June 2014, Vaclav Prospal in July 2009, Mark Parrish in July 2008, and Darcy Tucker in June 2008.

The rest of the buyouts — 111 of them — have been with two years or less left on contracts.

For the San Jose Sharks — Kane and Burns have four years left on their contracts, Vlasic five, Couture and Karlsson six — so unless they plan to break with history and take on unprecedented salary cap penalties, the Sharks are probably stuck with these deals for at least another year or two.

For what it’s worth, Martin Jones has three seasons left on his contract — and he’s been bad enough to be an exception to the rule.

Okay, so the San Jose Sharks aren’t likely to buy out Kane, Couture, Burns, Vlasic, or Karlsson soon. Can they trade any of them? What might a trade look like?

Let’s look at that tomorrow.

But anyway, here are all 122 non-compliance, 26-or-older buyouts: