Why Coyotes continue to stockpile contracts for players with career-ending injuries

Why would a retired NHLer be taking shots at one of his former clubs? As with many things, the answer is money.

John Scott, who played 11 games with the Arizona Coyotes in 2015-16, took to Twitter on Thursday to roast the Yotes after Arizona picked up two more players during trade deadline season who will never play a game for the team.

Scott is referring to the fact Arizona acquired Jakob Voracek and his $8.25-million cap hit from the Columbus Blue Jackets on Thursday, just over a week after it traded for Shea Weber and the $7.9-million hit he carries. Voracek and Weber now join former Winnipeg Jet Bryan Little as players on the Arizona spreadsheet on long-term injured reserve who are never expected to play in the league again, but whose cap hits — which all run at least through next season — help get Arizona to the salary floor.

By way of a quick refresher, recall that with a salary cap also comes a floor teams are required to spend to. While big-spending contenders sometimes seek out these LTIR contracts because they can grant them more breathing space by allowing them to exceed the cap at the top end, they’re also useful to a shoe-string team like Arizona because it can technically meet the cap floor ($61 million) without having to actually spend that much money. As Scott noted, the Coyotes' payroll in real money is in and around $20 million less than that $61 million figure.

(The contracts for those players who are ostensibly retired are often insured, so the team usually isn’t on the hook to pay the actual money. Also, the actual salary owed to players on the back end of those contracts can also be much lower than the cap hit determined by the annual average value).

While the Coyotes aren’t technically doing anything wrong, you can understand why players (and former players) who want to see more money flowing into the system get mad when a team can essentially meet its salary floor requirement without going all the way into its wallet.

The bottom line, it’s a loophole Arizona is likely to continue exploiting, just as teams at the other end of the spending spectrum will use LTIR contracts to help squeeze another body in under the cap.

Of course, this isn’t the only context in which the Coyotes are sometimes knocked for being spendthrift. They, presumably, could have gotten a bigger haul for Jakob Chychrun had they broadened his market by being willing to swallow some of his salary for the next two seasons. Instead, they chose to retain on Nick Bjugstad’s cheap, expiring deal and get involved as a third party to eat a small amount of salary in the swap that sent Patrick Kane from Chicago to the Rangers via the desert. Again, Kane’s number comes clean off the books at the end of the season.

The idea, though, according to Coyotes GM Bill Armstrong, is to keep his powder dry so he can afford to absorb bloated contracts teams will pay him with draft capital to take, as was the case nearly two years ago when the New York Islanders sent two second-rounders and a third to Arizona along with Andrew Ladd and his $5.5-million cap hit.

“The advantage of not taking money is really just about acquiring more assets for the following year through bad contracts and being able to spend that money to generate assets,” Armstrong told the Jeff Marek Show on Thursday.

The Coyotes haven’t made the playoffs in a full season since 2011-12 and, in all likelihood, ending that drought will require shelling out for better players at some point.