Red Wings finally call up Leino.. but not really
So with Johan Franzen going down for a few weeks with a knee injury, the Red Wings needed a forward.
They called up Ville Leino, a highly-regarded rookie free agent out of Finland, from Grand Rapids. Except not. Because they don’t have the cap space.
There was talk that Leino was good enough to have made the team out of camp, but then the Red Wings went and inexplicably signed Darren McCarty to a contract and kept him on the team instead, and there he remains. The problem is that Franzen’s injury might not be bad enough that the team can put him on the long-term IR (meaning he’d miss a minimum of 24 days or 10 games).
If Franzen’s injury is that bad, he can go on IR and have his salary not count against the cap for the length of his stay in the M*A*S*H unit. But until the Red Wings determine that or send McCarty down (where he belongs), and one assumes that with a game tonight they’ll get the decision squared away fairly quickly, Leino, who has an $875,000 cap hit, will continue to play in a league he’s obviously far too good for (he’s 4-5-9 in five AHL games) and Detroit will look for scoring from within the team itself.
I really do wonder what was going through Ken Holland’s mind when he signed McCarty. The guy can’t really fight, skate, shoot, or defend any more and is obviously not trusted by his coach (witness his team-low 7:03 of time per night with no special teams play) but they signed him to a deal that was above league minimum. Out of loyalty or something? I don’t know. But for a top-class organization like the Detroit, it was a particularly dumb move, and now it’s coming back to bite them on the ass.
Tough break for the kid, but this is on the front office.
October 27th, 2008 at 6:43 pm
People on IR don’t go off the cap. They remain on the cap, but if teams require it they can request relief to allow them to go above the cap up to an amount equal to the player’s salary.
It actually makes a difference with regards to accruing cap space for deadline trades, and things of that sort.
October 28th, 2008 at 1:09 am
McCarty is a bum who hasn’t been useful since scoring a hat trick against Patrick Roy in the 2002 WCF. He’s had his day, and I can’t for the life of me figure out why Illitch, Holland, Yzerman, Nill & Co. gave him a new contract.
Leino at the big boys table is something i’d love to see sometime this season, too.
October 28th, 2008 at 6:05 am
[...] Two-Line Pass recently had a great post taking the Wings to task for not having enough cap space to …. Ryan’s beef with Detroit is the money they spent on Darren McCarty, who’s been used sparingly by Detroit coach Mike Babcock. [...]