How is Dwight King going to avoid waivers?

October 19, 2012
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Mayor’s Manor reports that Dwight King has “signed a minor league contract” and is going to play in Manchester. I assume more details are forthcoming. All of the Kings’ waiver-exempt players (Andrei Loktionov, Jordan Nolan, Slava Voynov) were loaned to Manchester before the September 15 lock-out date, per a special agreement between the NHL and the union, allowing the usual waiver period to be moved up several days. King, whose exemption expired at the end of this season, was not sent down. However, it appears the Kings have decided that it’s safe to, in effect, send him down now. Since there is no CBA, there is no waiver process to clear. I get that. But what’s going to happen when hockey resumes and players have to be assigned? Where is King, officially? He can’t be on loan to the Monarchs, because he hasn’t been loaned, because there is no process for loaning players right now (because there’s no CBA). He’s off the reservation, just like Anze Kopitar, Alec Martinez, Jonathan Bernier and all the other NHLers who signed to play in Europe. The Kings have (I assume they gave their blessing to this) decided that King is allowed to sign with Manchester just like Kopitar is free to sign in Sweden. But this is a grey area. What’s stopping the Kings from having their entire team sign minor league contracts in Manchester and in effect having an off-the-books training camp and pre-season?

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Some posts the robot says are related, but I'll let you be the judge of that:

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This entry was posted on October 19, 2012 at 9:40 AM and is filed under Latest. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

  • https://twitter.com/jsalsLA jsalsLA

    maybe they are taking a chance that this new CBA will in deed have the part where you can’t bury NHL contracts in the minors? from what i understand, if that goes through, there won’t be any re-entry waivers.

    • http://www.mcsorleys-stick.com/ Quisp

      Yes, but he hasn’t cleared waivers to be “loaned.”

  • Token

    Right before the lockout the NHL and AHL made a new agreement that any player on the clear day roster of an AHL team can sign a separate contract with the AHL club that does not interfere with their NHL contract. Thus waivers do not apply and the new AHL contract terminates with the lockout.

    • http://www.mcsorleys-stick.com/ Quisp

      I must have missed the part where “thus waivers do not apply.” Technically, all AHL players have an AHL contract separate from their NHL contract; that’s what a 2-way contract is. As I understand it.

      • http://www.mcsorleys-stick.com/ Quisp

        From Rich’s post week before the lockout:

        “There’s also a chance that more players could be headed to Manchester during a (probable) NHL lockout. There are five additional players who meet the criteria to sign an AHL-only contract during the lockout. They are Andrew Campbell, Marc-Andre Cliche, Rich Clune, Thomas Hickey and Jake Muzzin. So, there is a way for the Kings to get those players to the AHL without the waiver process, but there’s no guarantee that they will sign those AHL contracts. We should know more in the next few days.”

        • Token

          Yep, that’s the Hammer summary but I think I got the first news of this from Dregger or somesuch. Could have been Mackenzie, can’t remember.

          • Token

            Also, forgot to mention King signed a one-way contract so he gets the special treatment. Whole clear-day angle.

            • http://www.mcsorleys-stick.com/ Quisp

              A one-way contract simply means that if the player is loaned to another league (i.e. the AHL) he gets his NHL salary. Obviously, King can’t get his NHL salary now because the NHL isn’t paying anybody. And I get that this is the crux of your point (that the whole “clear-day” angle is the thing that makes him waiver-exempt). But it seems odd to me that this is really the case, since this could only apply to the very small number of players who (1) were still bouncing back and forth between the AHL and NHL last spring, while (2) had their waiver-exemption expire over the summer, as King did.

              I must be missing something here.

              Also, the clear-day thing was supposed to prevent players from having to clear re-entry waivers, right? Not initial waivers. And King never went through the initial waivers.

              This is the thing that’s bothering me. That they appear to have done an end-around the initial waivers.

              • Token

                They never posted the text of the agreement on either NHL or AHL site so all we can do is guess. The rule for two-way contract players was that they are protected from re-entry waivers if they need to/pass waivers to go down. There is no data for the corner case so I figure King was waiver exempt for 2012 and on the clear day roster and my best guess is he gets protected from re-entry since clearing waivers was not needed to go down even though he is no longer waiver exempt. Kind of confusing but plausible.

  • jewelsfromthecrown

    All I know is I said on Twitter that they must’ve found a way around waivers and the Monarchs’ Twitter account favorited it. Funny huh?

    Can’t figure out how, though.

  • jewelsfromthecrown

    OK, I did some searching and apparently other NHL clubs have been sending non-waiver-exempt players down to the AHL for a while. It seems to be a safe move so long as the player was listed on the AHL club’s clear day roster, even if they were up with the NHL team at the time. One example is the Penguins’ Tangradi.

    It looks like King could have been there all along, but waited to see how long this lockout was going to go. His fiance is pregnant and he wants to stay in North America.

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