Roberto Luongo: 'Obviously my contract didn't suck'
The ex-Canucks netminder also said that if were up to him, he'd have gone on LTIR versus retiring.
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Published Dec 14, 2023 • Last updated 1 hour ago • 2 minute read
Roberto Luongo drew some big guffaws Thursday morning when asked by reporters about his comment 10 years ago about why he wasn’t traded from the Vancouver Canucks to the Toronto Maple Leafs.
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“Obviously my contract didn’t suck,” Luongo said, referring to the now-famous line he uttered to the media Apr. 3, 2013.
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“My contract sucks,” he said at the 2013 trade deadline.
But a decade later, it was all down to the moment, he explained. Just 15 minutes before he’d been told by then-GM Mike Gillis that despite all the efforts and speculation, they hadn’t been able to reach a deal with the Leafs to trade Luongo and it was all about the structure of his contract, which the new NHL CBA had created a new punishment for, now known as cap recapture.
“I was a little bit emotional at that very time. Didn’t really have time to regroup. And you know, obviously the contract didn’t suck but for certain reasons it did,” Luongo said Thursday. “I just remember being so emotional in that very moment.”
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When the time came in 2019 for Luongo to decide on his future, he said, as he’s said before, that after a month off the ice post-season he just didn’t want to get going again.
Most players in his position have simply gone on long-term injured reserve and continued to collect a paycheque, but Luongo went for the straight retirement. There were three years left on his deal, so he left US$3.68 million on the table.
The bigger consequence of the decision was it created a cap recapture penalty on the Canucks’ salary cap, which the NHL enforced to the letter. Canucks GM Jim Benning did appeal to the league to have the penalty waived, but there was no give and so the Canucks carried a $3 million penalty through 2021-22, when the contract was originally set to expire.
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“That wasn’t my call, unfortunately,” Luongo said. “I would have loved to have gone on LTIR and make a few extra dollars but it wasn’t my call.”
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