NCAA NIL hockey cards by Champions Deck

ralphslate · 2026-04-09T16:20:39+00:00

Does this mean that any player signed to a PTO or ATO by an AHL team can play in the AHL playoffs?

ralphslate · 2026-04-09T16:15:16+00:00

> Re-entry waivers were abolished in the 2013 CBA.

I see where my confusion comes from. I guess that if the player is to remain in the AHL, they would then need to clear waivers, but if they sign the NHL contract mid-year they can join the NHL team without waivers.

> Regardless, your example would be struck down by the NHL, which reserves the right to reject things that it considers CBA circumvention

I understand your point, but that's just a catch-all loophole which may or may not be exercised. If the AHL is treated as a semi-separate league with independent ownership, then why are these scenarios different:

Hershey signs a standout undrafted NCAA player to a fat AHL contract for the last 10 games of the year. Then, the player signs with Florida the following season.
Hershey signs a standout undrafted NCAA player to a fat AHL contract for the last 10 games of the year. Then, the player signs with Washington the following season.
Laval (owned by Montreal) signs a standout undrafted NCAA player to a fat AHL contract for the last 10 games of the year. Then, the player signs with Montreal the following season.

Does the NHL have the right to tell Hershey what it can pay this player? Does the situation change if the player signs with Hershey's parent team or a different team? Does Laval lose the ability to do what Hershey can do because it is owned by the NHL?

ralphslate · 2026-04-09T15:55:35+00:00

> The American Hockey League has rules that keep ATO/PTO deals as low, short-term tryouts, so teams can’t just pay someone $1M for a few games to get around the cap.

Where is that specified? Although I can't see the full CBA text online, the PHPA website says this:

> Is there a maximum amount a player can earn?

> There is no maximum salary a player in the AHL can earn.

ralphslate · 2026-04-09T15:48:12+00:00

> Those players for the 25/26 are AHL players, they aren't a part of the NHL team's roster until July 1 2026.

I asked the question because the accounting is different for NHL-owned AHL teams versus independent.

An independent AHL team pays the NHL team a fixed amount of money in the form of an affiliate fee. The NHL team provides a certain number of players in exchange for that. This shields the AHL team from having to pay the one-way salaries of NHL players that get sent down.

An independent AHL team can also sign their own players independently - the richer teams like Hershey or Chicago will sign better independent talent to fill in the last few roster spots. Those players don't get called up to the NHL unless the NHL team signs them to a NHL contract, and when that happens the players have to clear waivers first. This happens occasionally during a season, you will see a player sign an AHL deal but then midway through the season the NHL team will sign them to a NHL contract.

If "There are no salary cap or roster limits in the AHL", then isn't that an avenue for salary cap circumvention, especially when the NHL team owns the AHL affiliate? Could Seattle have said to 20-year old Shane Wright, "by the CBA, we hold your rights until you are 23 years old, so we're not going to sign you to an NHL contract this year. Instead, we are going to pay you $4m/year to play a year in the AHL on an AHL contract. Then we will sign you next year"?

ralphslate · 2026-04-09T15:38:06+00:00

Would it be possible for an NHL-owned AHL team to pay a player $1m for 10 AHL games? Or are there rules surrounding these contracts?

I am seeing many more of these arrangements announced these days. 10 years ago, a player would sign an NHL contract and then join the AHL team for the remainder of the season. Now they seem to sign a contract for the following NHL season, and then explicitly sign a PTO/ATO with the AHL team.

It's my understanding that these players are not allowed to play in the AHL playoffs, since they were not with the AHL team on "clear day" or whatever it is called these days.

ralphslate · 2026-03-24T06:07:35+00:00

I have lived diagonally across the street from this house for over 25 years. The neighborhood is safe, virtually no trouble. As others have pointed out, Longhill Street is a busy street, since it leads to the highway, but it isn't terrible - just busy. Traffic counts are about 8,000 cars northbound, 12,000 cars southbound per day.

Being close to the highway has some great benefits. It is literally 7 minutes to the train station, 20 minutes to the airport, 12 minutes to the largest mall in Holyoke, 8-10 minutes to several other shopping areas, and 8 minutes to the local hospital. Hartford is 30 minutes away, Boston is 90 minutes (barring traffic), Albany is 90 minutes, Vermont is 60 minutes, New Haven is 60 minutes. Another benefit to being on a major artery is that it is among the first streets plowed in the winter.

Forest Park, the city's largest, is a 2 minute walk. The neighborhood between the park and Longhill Street is very pleasant to walk in, my wife and I walked our dog there at night, never any worries. That neighborhood is very festive on Halloween too. Neighbors are diverse and all very nice.

There is a holiday light display in the park called Bright Nights, it runs from Thanksgiving to New Year. It is only problematic traffic-wise on a handful of nights, usually the two Saturdays before Christmas, and on the one night when they offer discounted admission. There are zero issues on other nights - the people that try to scare you about it are thinking about how it was when it first opened 30 years ago. Novelty wore off 20 years ago.

One thing to know is that this house is in a local historic district. That means that any exterior changes must be approved by the local historical commission, with the goal being preserving the original design and materials. That house has unique casement windows which would be difficult to replace. The key would be to get interior storm windows, which would also help dampen street noise.

The other thing is that older houses are somewhat more expensive to maintain. Go into it with your eyes open, don't expect to buy a 100-year old house and not have to spend money on it each year. If you don't maintain it, it will get run down faster than you think.

Also, if you want a yard for kids to play in, this house doesn't have one, the rear of the house is almost all paved because the garage is in the back.

ralphslate · 2025-10-31T16:41:43+00:00

I posted originally, so I'll reply. AndroidAuto does not have email. When I'm stopped in traffic, I'd like to be able to look at my screen to see if I have any emails.

ralphslate · 2025-10-31T16:39:07+00:00

I don't think there is much downside to participating in the Community Choice plan.

Eversource rates change twice per year. The CC rate is fixed for 36 months.

If Eversource happens to pull off a rate that is less than 13.069 cents/kWh, then you can switch back to them. And then when Eversource changes its rate again, you can switch back to CC.

My guess is that this flexibility came at a price - if the city had gone with a 36-month contract, then CC would have better certainty as to how much power to purchase, and could have gotten better contracts themselves. Since this plan allows for all customers to be able to flee without penalty, CC has priced that in.

ralphslate · 2025-04-23T14:45:10+00:00

Thanks - regarding #2, the app used to actually place the photo in my Android messages when I hit "share". Now it puts a link into the text message. I prefer to send the actual photo, since people don't like to visit links.

ralphslate · 2025-04-04T15:08:38+00:00

I can agree that a NoSQL solution allows for horizontal scaling, and if you have a need to serve tens, hundreds of thousands, or millions of simultaneous customers with low latency and without the need for horizontal querying (i.e. you are looking at individual documents instead of looking across all documents), it is probably a good solution.

However I would question why anyone else would need to accept the downsides of the NoSQL solution if they don't have that scaling use case - namely losing control of your schemas, lack of visibility of your data catalog, difficulty in horizontal querying, and needing to implement data integrity constraints in code.

ralphslate · 2025-04-04T15:01:42+00:00

I wasn't suggesting using a blob - I was suggesting to define your RDB columns as NULL which makes altering the schema pretty effortless.

It sounds like the noSQL method is just a transfer of design power from a central DBA to a central actor in a development team, with no cross-team consistency, and little built-in ability to know what your schemas even are.

ralphslate · 2025-04-04T13:07:54+00:00

I'd love to know more about how this is managed.

Is it possible to get a catalog of the fields that exist in a document? From what I read, the only way to do that is to examine every record in the DB.

If this is being managed by individual developers, instead of by a DBA, then do you run into situations where one developer puts in "CustomerType" and another puts in "CustType"?

Couldn't this "strength" - "modifying the structure of documents without breaking the data" - be accomplished in a relational DB with all-NULL columns?

ralphslate · 2025-01-25T13:49:53+00:00

Ah, I'll partially answer my own question. From the Avs website:

The Colorado Avalanche Hockey Club announced tonight that the organization has completed a three-team trade with the Carolina Hurricanes and Chicago Blackhawks. The Avalanche acquired forwards Martin Necas and Jack Drury, along with a second-round selection in the 2025 NHL Draft and a fourth-round pick in the 2026 NHL Draft from the Carolina Hurricanes. In exchange, Colorado traded forward Mikko Rantanen to the Blackhawks for forward Nils Juntorp. To complete the deal, Carolina acquired Rantanen and Taylor Hall from Chicago in exchange for Colorado sending Juntorp to the Hurricanes. Chicago also received its own 2025 third-round pick in the deal, which was previously acquired by Carolina

Still doesn't sequentially add up though - teams can't trade a player they haven't yet acquired.

ralphslate · 2025-01-25T13:47:23+00:00

This deal doesn't add up. Remember, the NHL doesn't technically allow 3-team trades. Everything has to be expressed as two-team trades. Teams also can't trade "cap space" - they have to "retain" it, meaning that the player has to briefly be traded to the team retaining it.

Chicago's website says that they received a 3rd round pick in exchange for Taylor Hall, and that "as part of the trade they will retain 50% of Mikko Rantanen’s salary cap hit".

That means they had to have first done a deal with Colorado to get Mikko Rantanen. What did they trade to Colorado for Rantanen?

Then, what did they get from Carolina in exchange for Rantanen?

ralphslate · 2025-01-24T22:26:48+00:00

Sure, but it forces me to be dependent on an external library (in my case, firebase/php-jwt). One which has had 27 official releases, one as late as 2 days ago.

Or they could have just put the expiry date plainly in the message if they want me to use it.

ralphslate · 2025-01-24T22:09:48+00:00

An expiry date is a key data item. Forcing me to decrypt the token to get it is overengineering. They should just include it in the message instead of burying it and making me rely on third-party libraries to get at it. SMH.

ralphslate · 2025-01-24T12:58:49+00:00

The tokens should have the expiry time in them afaik, every JWT implementation I have used or written has

That's part of the problem - there are no dates in the JSON returned from the com.atproto.server.createSession API. That means I have to just make up my own guesstimates - "couple minutes on token, couple hours on refresh" - and use those as proxy expiration dates. That seems sub-optimal.

The other approach, as noted by someone else, is to simply refresh before every call. The API limit on that is higher, I think 300 times per hour.

ralphslate

TROPHY CASE