Carolina Hurricanes: Potential Compliance Buyout recipients

The Carolina Hurricanes could be getting Compliance Buy-Outs due to COVID

With a lot of rumors still flying around the NHL, there’s still a question as to whether compliance buyouts will be given out. If so, who is it used on?

With strong rumors that the NHL salary cap will remain stagnant in the wake of the Coronavirus pandemic, there’s a strong chance we will see compliance buyouts handed out to the NHL teams to help them remain cap compliant. This could be essential for some teams that are pushed right against the cap.

I know that one of the most frequently asked questions with compliance buyouts is “what are they?” So, I’m going to lift this word for word from the NHL and NHL players association’s collective bargaining agreement and then explain it because they’re not so good at putting the words together and them making a lot of sense.

“Any player receiving a compliance buyout receives two-thirds of the remaining contract across twice the remaining term of the deal”. This is almost identical to a normal buyout. If you need an example of a normal buyout in Carolina Hurricanes history, I would point you to the man who seems to be making money until the end of time, Alexander Semin.

“But his salary-cap charge to the team is wiped clean”. This means there’s no cap penalty for it. Using Semin as the example again, he makes 2,333,333 from the Hurricanes and will do until the end of next year. That counts against the cap for the Hurricanes. With a compliance buyout or amnesty buyout, that cap hit doesn’t exist. The player is just gone. They go into free agency.

It is important to note that any player that receives a compliance buyout cannot be re-signed by that team for a calendar year. This is to prevent teams from abusing the system, otherwise, teams would just use them to remove bad contracts and sign better ones.

So, with that in mind, it will take careful deliberation to determine who will receive a compliance buyout from this current group of Carolina Hurricanes. There are some obvious candidates and some who are maybe more reaches. But there is a case to be made for each of the players I plan on mentioning, and you can yell at me for it to your heart’s content.

So, compliance buyouts. I’m going to work on the basis there is only going to be 1 per team, however, there were 2 last time (in 2013-14) due to the lockout. This isn’t the same, but it’s close enough to expect the possibility of compliance buyouts. So which Canes could we see gone?