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cmaleski2 said:
Snipping from the CBA available on NHLPA.com

10.1 Unrestricted Free Agents.

(a) Group 3 Players and Free Agents.

(i) Any Player who either has seven (7) Accrued Seasons or is 27 years of age
or older as of June 30 of the end of a League Year, shall, if his most recent
SPC has expired, with such expiry occurring either as of June 30 of such
League Year or June 30 of any prior League Year, become an Unrestricted
Free Agent. Such Player shall be completely free to negotiate and sign an
SPC with any Club, and any Club shall be completely free to negotiate and
sign an SPC with such Player, without penalty or restriction, or being
subject to any Right of First Refusal, Draft Choice Compensation or any
other compensation or equalization obligation of any kind.

Nikishin would be eligible to be an NHL UFA after the 2028-29 season.

After Nikishin's entry level deal ends in 25-26....

July 2026 - Not a free agent (10.2.C status). No Arbitration rights and not offer sheet eligible. A player signing an entry level deal at 22 or 23 has to have 2 years professional experience to get to Group 2 free agency. You need to have played 10 or more Professional games while under contract to accrue a year of professional experience. Assuming Nikishin burns year 1 next week, he will fall short of the 10 games necessary. This will leave him in this 'not a free agent' window where he has no leverage other than not playing.

July 2027 - Group 2 RFA Arbitration rights (offer sheet eligible)
July 2028 - Group 2 RFA Arbitration rights (offer sheet eligible)
July 2029 - UFA

Of course the Canes would most likely try to lock Nikishin into a long term deal well through those Group 2 RFA and early UFA years.
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Thanks for that. I'm appreciative of your work as our CBA/Cap guru.

Also, I'm reminded of just how much it sucks not to have a reliable contract data source like CapFriendly. Screw you, Ted Leonsis.
 
Puckpedia has a few additional snippets on the Nikishin contract.

As we discussed earlier, Nikishin's 'bonuses' are by requirement 'challenging to earn'. If you are going to burn the first year of the entry level deal, Type A entry level performance bonuses are impossible to earn and just about type B performance bonuses (major awards) are impossible as well. HOWEVER, one Type B bonus exists that is not impossible to earn in a burned entry level season (extremely unlikely but not impossible). That is the Conn Smythe. Puckpedia has year 1 of Nikishin's contract including a $1,037,500 Type B performance bonus if he wins the Conn Smythe.

Year 2 has $3 million in potential performance bonuses. I mapped this out in an earlier post, but the absolute maximum in performance bonuses are:

Type A Limit of 250k per bonus category, $1 million total per season. These are things like finish in the top X on the team in goals, assists, points, +/-, Blocks etc. for your position OR making the all star team, all-rookie team. etc.

Type B Aggregate Maximum of $2.5 million per season. This can be split up any way a team/player agrees to. These are tied to finishing above a certain threshold for major NHL awards and finishing X overall in the NHL for certain stats for your position. Goals, assists, points, Ice Time, points per Game.

PuckPedia claims Nikishin has a potential $3 million in total performance bonuses for year 2. Only $1 million of those can be for 'Type A' bonuses (the easier category to achieve). That leaves $2 million for the 'harder' Type B bonuses. Remember that the Calder is NOT a trophy allowed in this type B category (The NHL pays a bonus to the top 3 vote receivers for the Calder, but that is not one of the trophies a team and player can negotiate a Type B bonus for). That leaves things like the Norris OR top 10 in the NHL for Dmen in Goals, Assists, Points, Ice Time, Points per game. You have to have a really good NHL season to cash in type B bonuses.

Anyhow, Nikishin does have a performance bonus opportunity in this first season...if he wins the Conn Smythe. Next season, assuming he is a regular in the Canes NHL top 6, he (hopefully) will be able to collect some (all?) of the $1 million in type A bonuses available to him if he is healthy and produces at a level he would be expected to. The $2 million in Type B bonuses will require him to have a 'NHL top 10 level' type of season in whatever stat categories were negotiated. His performance bonus opportunity for next season of $3 million is line with what a 3 overall draft pick would generally expect to receive.
 
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Fayettenamcanesfan said:
It’s why I came back to this place all those years later. Even though this place …. The old version almost got me fired when I posted inside info the team found out about. Did I ever tell you guys that story?
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I don‘t remembered it if you did.
 
andyt said:
I don‘t remembered it if you did.
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So, it was back in 2001 when I think we were at Fanhome or something like that. My username was canesworker (first mistake). There was a lot of chatter on the board with puckiin_a, Camille and some other folks were debating whether Barrasso would make Olympic team. They were wondering why nothing had been announced.

Anyway, I was in the locker room the day before a game, just after practice, and I was painting the toes of the boys skates…. Some of you might know what that is…. Another story for another time…. When Barrasso gets a call at his locker from USA Hockey and the NHL. After the call he is all smiles and he looks over to me and said, looks like I’m going to Salt Lake City! I run into the equipment room to get the people that matter so he can tell them. Apparently Carolina and the NHL wanted to wait until that night to do a brief presser and make the formal announcement and not release it publicly.

So in the meantime, I drive home and post on the board that I heard the conversation and he had made the Olympic team…. Only about 7 hours earlier then they wanted the locals to know. The local media then picked up on what I wrote……second mistake

I still didn’t know I did anything wrong until I show up for the game the next day. I’m walking across the ice from the visitors locker room and I see Wally Tatomir, Jim Rutherford and Paul Maurice sitting on the bench. Wally, with a printed out stack of papers. It was then I realized, that professional teams monitor all fan and news sites…..ALL of them. Someone in the org saw my post and they traced my ip address, got my account from fanhome and found out who spilled the beans. I was completely embarrassed beyond belief. I was given the ultimatum and, sorry guys, I choose my job with the canes and left the site 🤣

I was basically told that in that job, you are going to hear and see things that stay in the room. Always. It was a hard lesson to learn.

I see it today in my part time job covering college football and basketball and recruiting. We get so much inside info I have to determine what is safe to release, because someone does see it. I guarantee someone in the canes office monitors this site on a fairly regular basis. It’s one way to get a pulse on the fans
 
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Brian LeBlanc had an account on one of the old sites. When he got a press pass he stopped posting but still lurked. Whichever site it was posted that days member birthdays. There was a guy who would wish Brian a happy birthday and I’d delete the post as soon as I saw it, he couldn’t let anyone know that he was on the board.
 
Brian Tatum had an account. I was good friends with Aaron Ward and his first wife and when I was over the house they would want me to pull up the site to see what the fans were saying.
 
Fayettenamcanesfan said:
So, it was back in 2001 when I think we were at Fanhome or something like that. My username was canesworker (first mistake). There was a lot of chatter on the board with puckiin_a, Camille and some other folks were debating whether Barrasso would make Olympic team. They were wondering why nothing had been announced....
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Thanks for sharing that story! Wow!
 
ThinIce said:
Thanks for sharing that story! Wow!
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I have tons of them. Maybe I can make it up to a group tailgate and share some. Love to get a playoff ticket some time and get together, but I’m sure a regular season game would be easier to get. I’m getting so old the only contact I have left is Bob Gorman and Jeff Daniels. I doubt Brindy even remembers me, even though I am sitting in one of his old chairs with my feet up on the ottoman🤣

When he arrived from Philly his stuff was going in storage and he didn’t have room for this leather office style chair and ottoman. He just gave it to me. I cant get rid of the old thing. It’s like a prized possession llol
 
StormChaserBH said:
I feel sorry for whichever staffer is assigned to read Facebook replies
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Yeah ... it was garbage pail duty.

I can't remember the guy's name but there was a staffer that was assigned to monitor The Scoreboards site (the one right before this one) that kept up a dialog with me at the behest of the team communications staff since I was the primary moderator ... and in that case, the co-owner*. IIRC he was actually a ticket sales/customer support staffer and he HATED having to trawl through the general nonsense on the board so he asked me to let him know which threads had gone so far off the beaten path that we were no longer talking about roster issues ... which happened fairly regularly ... so he could drop them from his list. At first he was super secretive about the whole thing, but after a while he dropped the spy act and just communicated openly. The team was mostly interested in two things ... anybody on staff or adjacent to staff like our friend Kevin who was leaking info, and the fans' opinions of roster moves. The first concern is obvious. The second was more just to get the feel of the fanbase in general and they combed through pretty much every public forum and monitored call in radio shows and the like.

That kind of stuff does NOT go into the team's thinking when it comes to actual hockey decisions, but it does color how they release info to the public. I also used to have back-channel dialog with several of the media people who covered the Canes and they were interested in the same kind of thing. If a topic got particularly heated, I would sometimes send one of those guys a heads up that there was fodder for a column. That kind of thing.

And the guys you ought to truly feel sorry for are the college interns monitoring college football and basketball message boards. Those things are still quite insane. Maybe more so now, since the message board format has fallen out of common use. It boiled down to the real hardcase nuts over time.

*all that means is that I split the hosting fees with another dude who has since gone on to be a TV weatherman in the Pacific Northwest. Our ad revenues averaged about $10 a month and we covered the rest out of pocket.
 
jeffbear said:
Yeah ... it was garbage pail duty.

I can't remember the guy's name but there was a staffer that was assigned to monitor The Scoreboards site (the one right before this one) that kept up a dialog with me at the behest of the team communications staff since I was the primary moderator ... and in that case, the co-owner*. IIRC he was actually a ticket sales/customer support staffer and he HATED having to trawl through the general nonsense on the board so he asked me to let him know which threads had gone so far off the beaten path that we were no longer talking about roster issues ... which happened fairly regularly ... so he could drop them from his list. At first he was super secretive about the whole thing, but after a while he dropped the spy act and just communicated openly. The team was mostly interested in two things ... anybody on staff or adjacent to staff like our friend Kevin who was leaking info, and the fans' opinions of roster moves. The first concern is obvious. The second was more just to get the feel of the fanbase in general and they combed through pretty much every public forum and monitored call in radio shows and the like.

That kind of stuff does NOT go into the team's thinking when it comes to actual hockey decisions, but it does color how they release info to the public. I also used to have back-channel dialog with several of the media people who covered the Canes and they were interested in the same kind of thing. If a topic got particularly heated, I would sometimes send one of those guys a heads up that there was fodder for a column. That kind of thing.

And the guys you ought to truly feel sorry for are the college interns monitoring college football and basketball message boards. Those things are still quite insane. Maybe more so now, since the message board format has fallen out of common use. It boiled down to the real hardcase nuts over time.

*all that means is that I split the hosting fees with another dude who has since gone on to be a TV weatherman in the Pacific Northwest. Our ad revenues averaged about $10 a month and we covered the rest out of pocket.
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Yea. That’s what I run into now with my college connections. They scrub everything. Once they ID a press member or ‘insider’ and have their Ip’s, they will scrub the web for mentions. When we were debating the ACC expansion stuff here I got an email from the ACC asking me to be careful with what I was saying. When I say I have connections in the ACC, UNC and NCsU believe it. But I’m old enough and smart enough to keep my mouth shut because I want to keep my access. I should send you the screenshot from the email lol
 
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Fayettenamcanesfan said:
Yea. That’s what I run into now with my college connections. They scrub everything. Once they ID a press member or ‘insider’ and have their Ip’s, they will scrub the web for mentions. When we were debating the ACC expansion stuff here I got an email from the ACC asking me to be careful with what I was saying. When I say I have connections in the ACC, UNC and NCsU believe it. But I’m old enough and smart enough to keep my mouth shut because I want to keep my access. I should send you the screenshot from the email lol
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In almost every way, I'm happy that any connections I've had over the years have pretty much aged out or gone on to other stuff.
 
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