Tomorrow is Christmas the Free Agent Jamboree. Some people want the Kings to sign Brad Richards for $8,000,000 per year. Some want the Kings to extend Drew Doughty. Some want both. Some are afraid of the dreaded offer sheet. Some are (pretty) certain the Kings would match.
Cap Geek is likely to be everyone’s go-to resource for cap numbers. However, Cap Geek does not figure qualifying offers into a team’s cap tally, and qualifying offers count against the cap after 7/1. I have taken the liberty of calculating the minimum QO figures for four of the five players who received offers before the deadline. The fifth player is Doughty, and I left his cap number blank, for the obvious reason that everyone wants to know how much room we have to sign Doughty, or to match an offer sheet, should one come his way. The other four names (Lewis, Richardson, Moller and Martinez) all have a cap number that equals the minimum (and presumed to be actual) qualifying offer required by the CBA (for players making between $600K and $1MM, that’s 105% of their previous salary) multiplied by (in the case of two-way contracts i.e. Martinez and Moller) the fraction of the season spent with the big club.
The other thing to keep in mind is that the cap ceiling increases by 10% during the summer. Teams have until the last day of training camp to get down below the regular (non-summer) cap ceiling.
The final figure on the chart is the maximum salary for this season, which is 20% of the upper limit. This would be the most any insane club could offer Doughty in an offer sheet.
If you want to spitball how much UFA the Kings can afford, it would be a good idea for UFA + Doughty < $13,422,000.
Only, you also need to budget for the difference between the qualifying offer numbers and the actual cap hits for the four roster spots in question: Moller, Martinez, Richardson, Lewis. To be safe, call that $1MM. So UFA + Doughty needs to be less than $12,422,000.
Oh, and Colin Fraser, since he is not on LTIR, counts against the cap. Thanks, Tambellidiot.
