NHL Cap Court: Do William Nylander or Adrian Kempe have bad contracts? Does anyone?

It’s been a while since we’ve broken out the Cap Court gimmick. The idea here is that we pick five players and try to figure out if they have bad contract from a team perspective. Too much money, too much term, that sort of thing. We make the case for and against, and find a few comparables to help us. Then we deliver a verdict.

Nice and simple. Or at least it’s supposed to be. But now that the salary cap’s upper limit is growing again, and growing quickly, does anyone have a bad contract anymore? Aside from the obvious misfires that nobody’s debating, just about every deal out there could be defended with a shrug and a mumbled “cap’s going up”.

It’s enough to make it tempting to hang a Sprit Halloween sign on the old cap courtroom. But this is still one of my favorite recurring bits, and we haven’t tried it all season. So let’s give it a shot. Five more names, five more contracts, and five more verdicts. Can we find a guilty verdict among them? We'll find out, and we'll start with one of the biggest names out there...

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Do Elias Pettersson and Jusse Saros have bad contracts? NHL Cap Court returns

Let’s do another round of Cap Court. You know the drill by now: Five players, five dicey contracts (from a team perspective), and five arguments over whether the deal is actually bad enough to be “bad”.

Today, we’ll cover a perplexing goaltender, a one-time sure thing who may have peaked as a rookie, and two players recently traded away by the Senators. But we’ll start with what I believe may be the single biggest contract in terms of total dollars that we’ve ever tackled in this column…

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Emergency Cap Court session: Does the rising cap change the verdict on these stars?

But the cap is going up.

For years, it’s been the go-to excuse for any questionable contract signed in the NHL. Aside from the years immediately following the pandemic, the NHL’s cap ceiling always goes up, at least a little bit. And that meant that any criticism of a contract would immediately be met by a condescending reminder that the cap would eventually go up. A rising cap was an optimistic fan’s – and an overspending GM’s – very best friend, even when it was obviously nonsense.

Except…

Well, now the cap is really going up. Like, way up, by an amount that’s enough to have us reconsidering what we thought we knew about how the league’s economics work. So today, I’m convening a special session of Cap Court, the feature where we put contracts on trial. We’re going to reach back into the last few editions of this column to find deals that got the dreaded “bad contract” verdict, and give them another look based on last week’s news.

I went back through the archives and found five contracts that have a solid case for appeal. Let’s see if any of those can reverse the original call.

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