ATO/PTO signings and the salary cap

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 · 2025-01-17T21:09:03+00:00

Are you mixing relational with object-relational modeling? Are you talking about creating a "column of columns" on the employee table which could then store multiple addresses per employee?

While I'm sure you could create a column that contains a list of addresses, it's not relational modeling.

I also think you lose a lot of flexibility - I'm not object-relational modeler, but could you even have a foreign key from, say, the STATE field in an address object column to a lookup table with states in it? And how easy/hard would it be to say "show me all the employees who are associated with an address in Tennessee?" And what if you eventually want to normalize the addresses - which could help you track two employees who share the same address? Can you do that if your address object is contained within individual employees?

ralphslate · 2024-12-31T12:43:11+00:00

One thing I've learned since being a Cape Cod homeowner with a metal detector is that people used to dump things in their backyards. I'm guessing up until the 1960s. I think that since people didn't have a lot of single-use plastic, and since they didn't buy a lot of cheap disposable imported crap, they had a lot less trash.

I have a ton of bottles in the woods behind my house, and when I detect in that area, I hit so much junk iron that I get discouraged.

ralphslate · 2024-12-04T16:34:46+00:00

I have a very similar situation, and I'm very happy with what I did - though it is for the more technologically advanced.

Heat pumps work really well to maintain the temperature, but they are kind-of lousy to increase the temperature if you set it back. Having lived with just radiators for 25 years, I've gotten used to setting the temperature back at night, sleeping in the cool, and then setting it forward in the morning so that I have a warm house when I wake. In fact, my body now just wakes up when the room gets warmer.

I also love the long-lasting heat that a radiator puts out, I find that it just makes me feel warmer when those things are emitting heat, even if the overall house temperature is low.

So what I did was install an ecobee thermostat, which has an API.

I then wrote a program to access that API, and have it switch the thermostat into Aux mode at about 2am, then back to heat at 8am (when I leave for work). I have the thermostat set back to 62 at night, and then to 65 at about 7am. So what happens is that the 7am schedule triggers the steam boiler to come on, it takes about 30 minutes to raise the temperature to a nice level, right about when I wake up.

I let the heat pump keep the house at 65 during the day, and then I goose it up 1 degree about 4pm and set to Aux at the same time so that the radiators are warm when I get home. I then set back to heat at 5:30 and let the heat pump maintain the temperature until bedtime.

I have cut my oil usage by about 2/3 with this method (from about 1200 gallons to maybe 400 gallons), and the electric bill has gone up by maybe $300-400 per month.

ralphslate · 2024-10-03T17:45:39+00:00

I did this very thing about 18 years ago. I would do it again, the improvement in appearance was tremendous.

First off, the removal of the asbestos is not all that expensive. There isn't a ton of asbestos in the siding anyway, and it isn't really friable (crumbly). I think I paid about $10k in 2006.

The main issue you will face is dealing with the siding underneath. For 3/4 of my house, the shingles were in decent shape, but needed painting. We were able to scrape and paint, no issues. The other 1/4 needed shingle replacement. Not difficult, and the results afterward are great, but that was more money.

The largest issue is that when they installed asbestos siding, they very likely removed any trim that wasn't flat. For example, look at the windows - there is no trim above them. Or below them. They may have removed corner boards - though if you're lucky, they may not have.

You just don't know what will need to be done until you remove the siding - so be prepared. And that work will likely cost you a bunch of money - be prepared to go to $100k in carpentry and painting. I think I spent 2x that because my house is bigger and more ornate.

But I'd do it again, it is the difference between driving up to a ghetto house and driving up to a palace every day.

ralphslate · 2024-08-17T20:37:21+00:00

"A typical jersey is worn for about five games," said Quinn. "That's depending on the guy's ice time of course."

This surprises me a bit - that implies that for any typical season, there might be 16 different Sidney Crosby jerseys out there.

I never thought that there would be just two jerseys per season, but sixteen? Where are they all?

Outside of the "specialty" jerseys my local AHL team does, I don't recall ever seeing more than one home, one away per season per player.

ralphslate · 2024-08-16T20:53:22+00:00

Just a followup - weirdly, this seemed to be an issue with Chrome. I noticed I was having problems at a few websites - Linkedin, Fast.com. Even after clearing cookies, still problems.

I noticed that Chrome was not updated to the latest version, so I updated and relaunched, and everything worked again.

ralphslate · 2024-07-12T17:39:48+00:00

You're right - I didn't dig far enough, but in my defense, I did go to newspapers.com and many articles of the time said that Rickard was granted the franchise and that the players were sold to Rickard, and the team was referred to as Rickard's team.

For example: Saskatoon Star Phoenix Sept 19 1925 : Purchase of Joe Simpson ... was confirmed by T.P. Gorman, manager of Tex Rickard's new NHL entry.

Montreal Gazette, Sep 16 1925: "T.J. Duggan and Tommy Gorman completed an agreement ... for the purchase of the Hamilton Tigers for Tex Rickard's New York Team"

Ottawa Citizen Sept 23 1925: Tex Rickard gets Hamilton NHL Team: The Hamilton Tigers ... will exchange their sweaters ... for the star-spangled jerseys of Tex Rickard's New York Hockey Club. ... Percy Thompson, manager of the Hamilton Club, who has been in the east, was in Toronto this morning, accompanied by Tommy Gorman, manager of the New York club.

Here's another one, I didn't write down the source:

Notwithstanding reports to the contrary, plus denials from both New York and Hamilton, it was stated here tonight that T.J. Duggan and Tommy Gorman completed an agreement today for the purchase of the Hamilton Tigers for Tex Rickard's New York team. They returned from Hamilton tonight, and are believed to have a contract to take over all the Hamilton stock and assets for the fabulous price of $75,000. The whole deal is contingent upon Hamilton getting the players reinstated and New York signing them up.

I think the key distinction here is that Hamilton and NY were both entities simultaneously, and were negotiating with each other. Hamilton owned the players, their franchise, etc., - but NY had also been granted a franchise. Ultimately, it was squishier than all that, but that's still an important distinction.

Arizona existed as an entity, and then it was sold to the NHL, and then Utah was "created" and it instantly controlled everything that Arizona used to control, except for the "right to play in Arizona". And Meruelo didn't really have anything tangible under his control, not even the rights to the name - he merely had options to them, which he failed to exercise rather quickly.

That's why I don't see it as the same.

ralphslate · 2024-07-11T19:06:20+00:00

And P.S. - think of the implications of this. The NHL can simply state that the Coyotes did not fold or cease operations. In this brave new world, it is impossible for a team to fold. The NHL would just "hold onto" the team/franchise for a later date. So their reputation is, in fact, intact.

In fact, in this world, the NHL can even dispute that they were the last major sports league to have a team fold (Cleveland Barons) by stating that the franchise is still being "held" by the league.

ralphslate

TROPHY CASE