Performance bonuses on call-ups in LTIR
When a team is in LTI and call up players, both their cap hit and performance bonuses have to fit within the cap hit and performance bonuses of the player/players on LTI - but is this averaged annual performance bonuses across their contract, or achievable bonuses in that specific year? For example, Jamieson Rees has performance bonuses of $82.5K this year, but his average across his contract is $71.6K in performance bonuses.
Answer
When a team sets their LTIR pool (read more on this here), they are actually setting two pools.
One is the salary pool, which relates to cap hit and is the pool most often discussed. The other is the performance bonus pool. When the LTIR pool is set, for any player on the NHL roster that has performance bonuses in their contract, the average annual amount of their potential performance bonus goes into the performance bonus pool.
In the case of Rees, it's $55,000. It doesn’t matter if the bonuses were achieved. The total of all those average annual potential bonuses becomes the LTIR performance bonus pool.
If the total average annual amount of potential performance bonuses on the active roster ever exceeds the LTIR performance bonus pool while the team is in LTIR, the difference results in reduced cap space. That’s why teams try to have players with performance bonuses on the NHL roster when they set their initial LTIR pool, so that they have enough in the pool to cover players coming up during the season.
