Blackhawks get even more bad news following Duncan Keith retirement

The Chicago Blackhawks have been delivering nothing but bad news to their fan base, who was already horrified enough early last season when it was revealed that the entire franchise allowed former player Kyle Beach to continually be sexually molested by video coach Brad Aldrich and that intervening would have been too inconvenient during the 2010 postseason championship run. 

Of course, they've already traded the young and popular goal scoring forward Alex DeBrincat to the Ottawa Senators in exchange for relatively nothing, while also informing Dylan Strome and Dominik Kubalík that they won't be back next season. 

And while fans await the decisions on the future of franchise cornerstones Jonathan Toews and Patrick Kane, neither of whom want to play the twilight of their careers on a poor rebuilding squad, one former 3-time Stanley Cup winner decided to hang up his skates last week, and it's going to cost the Blackhawks in the pocket book.

Two-time Norris Trophy-winning defenseman Duncan Keith, won the 2015 Conn Smythe Trophy as postseason MVP, called it a career after playing his final NHL season with the Edmonton Oilers. He had spent the previous 16 years with the Blackhawks, with whom he inked a hefty 13-year, $72 million contract. At the time, it was the largest deal ever handed out in team history, and it was front loaded. 

The Blackhawks are going to be hit with what is known as a "recapture penalty", which is described as follows: 

"The rule, which NHL put into effect in the 2013 collective bargaining agreement, is viewed as a way to effectively punish teams whom the league determined had gamed the salary cap by front-loading contracts to an excessive degree.

Front-loading contracts can lower an NHL player’s salary cap number because the league uses the average annual value (AAV) of a contract to determine the cap hit, not the actual salary that the player makes in a given year."

Thanks to his decision to retire, Chicago is now faced with a dead cap hit of $5.5 million this season, and a dead cap hit of nearly $2 million next season.

Tough times ahead for the Blackhawks.