Injury Recoup

[Cdawg]

Teams get money back if a player is injured? Teams only get money back in other sports on non-guaranteed contracts. Take football for example. Guy signs a 5 year 20M contract with a 7M signing bonus. The only money in that contract that is a guarantee is the signing bonus, after year 1 the team can cut that player and not owe him the remainder. Even in football, if you cut the guy because of an injury, that player could still be owed money, hence why teams wait till players are medically cleared to cut them. In Basketball and Baseball, the contracts are guaranteed and don't have that luxury.

That's not true. Teams have insurance policies on most major contracts they sign. For example, when Joe Nathan blew out his arm for the Twins in ST two years ago they had insurance on his contract in the event that he had such an injury.

It didn't pay off the entire injury, but it paid a large percentage of it. This is from a Jason Stark article about it:

Twin peeks: We've heard from two league sources that the Twins have an insurance policy on Nathan's contract that figures to reimburse them a "significant" chunk of the $11.25 million their closer has coming this season. So that's more than enough money to allow them to chase a closer at the trading deadline if they think they need one.

So what CDawg is suggesting is realistic, but teams would have to pay for the insurance.

Rockets got back most of Yao Ming's last injury contract. he was earning something like 17M and they got back 11M of it. and at Noon I saw a tweet from Buster Olney that Tigers were gonna try to get 75% of Victor Martinez's contract. In football I believe they get what is called a roster exempt or injury exempt where if it's a Major injury(take Brady in 2005? I think, or Peyton this season) Where they can take that player off the roster and not have it count towards their luxery tax.(not really sure how it works b/c peyton was making like 15M but I know I heard it last season where someone was getting like 2M back b/c of an injury).
The time it takes is negligible. It takes 5 seconds for a team to post for it(it can be done any time during the season b/c we can all see how long the player is going to be out for) AND it takes 10 minutes total if that for the injury arbitrator to open up the team file, look at his salary, determine his injury and if handing back money is worth it.
That's why there is a conscious person deciding what is being given back, b/c if we just use a formula like in FA Comp, then there very well could be too much being handed out.