Will the NHL ever have their own Bobby Bonilla situation?

Happy Bobby Bonilla Day! if deferred contracts become more commonplace, will the NHL be paying players years after their careers end?

For baseball fans, July 1st has been sort of a humorous holiday. On the baseball calendar, it’s affectionately known as “Bobby Bonilla Day”, where the former baseball player gets paid his yearly dues of nearly $1.2 million dollars from the New York Mets for not playing baseball. Bonilla will be paid his magic sum every year until 2035. Will the NHL ever see their own Bobby Bonilla?

Surprisingly they already have, and that lucky player is former Arizona Coyotes franchise player Shane Doan. When Doan signed his final contract with the Arizona Coyotes in 2016, it included a deferred payment of his $1.3 million signing bonus.

Using a certain calculation and timetable, Doan is paid $250,000 every year until the 2022 season. That does not sound too bad considering once Arizona sends its final check to its former captain. The Mets will still be paying Bonilla for another thirteen years. Doan also received deferred payments for his signing bonuses, but those payments stopped in 2019.

There’s also Rick DiPietro and Mike Richards, but the former was bought out and the latter had his contract terminated. So technically, that’s not the same as Bonilla.

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Doan might not be the last. With the season on pause, the NHL and NHLPA have been discussing a new extension of the CBA with their available time for negotiations. Those negotiations have turned contentious, but an interesting tidbit came up saying that salary deferral may be used to deal with the always worried about the problem of player escrow.

The only details that came up so far is that it would be a one-season only deferral of 10%, returned in full in the future. The benefit to the players would be a lower escrow rate.

Obviously, a lot of calculations come into play with these types of things. So will the NHL ever see a Bobby Bonilla type of player, who’s paid millions long after his playing career ends? That’s almost a certain no.

The NHL has a hard salary cap, which the MLB lacked at the time of Bonilla’s contract and still doesn’t have to this day. Without that salary cap, it makes it easier for weird moves such as keeping Bonilla on the books for a six-figure salary year after year.

What the Coyotes did with Doan was one thing. It was a short term solution. With the NHL salary cap changing year by year, it’s impossible to forecast that long in advance. Thus any NHL would never try such a move.

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The NHL will never see a Bobby Bonilla, if by “Bobby Bonilla” you mean getting paid so long for doing nothing that your contract is the joke of the sports world. However, we can expect to see salary deferment grow. If it solves the escrow problem, it will be a very valuable tool in labor negotiations.

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