According to Sportsnet’s Elliotte Friedman, the Sharks have placed forward Adam Burish on unconditional waivers this morning for the purpose of buying out the 32-year-old forward who had one year remaining on the four-year contract he signed as a free agent in 2012. Burish spent the bulk of this past season in the AHL after clearing regular waivers in late November and being subsequently re-assigned to the minors.
Burish was owed $1.85 million for the coming season, meaning his buyout will come in at two-thirds that amount, or $1.23 million, spread out evenly over the next two years. It isn’t always the case that a bought-out player’s cap hit will match the monetary value of his buyout but that’s the scenario here: Burish will count against the Sharks’ cap for $616K in each of the next two seasons. That’s a lower cap hit than the $950K charged to the Sharks while Burish was buried in the minors last year but this move does keep Burish on the books for a year longer.
Burish’s contract will go down as one of the biggest free agent failures of Doug Wilson’s tenure which is something of a positive in the sense that it was a relatively minor deal but it’s also emblematic of the GM’s struggles in properly evaluating quality depth players; how a career fourth-liner with no discernible NHL-level talent was deemed worthy of a four-year contract I’ll never know. The fact that Wilson made an identical, if half as large, mistake by giving an even worse forward in Mike Brown a multi-year contract extension last offseason showed he still hadn’t learned from the Burish mistake. Hopefully he finally has now.
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