Fittingly the news of the salary cap implications here (especially for Vancouver) overshadowed the actual retirement news here.

Much as Luongo's contract dictated a good portion of his career, temporarily sticking him in Vancouver and ultimately leaving him back in Florida, meaning the last several seasons of his career were spent with bad teams because his onerous contract dictated it.

Of course he started his career on bad teams in New York and Florida, where he routinely led the league in shots against and had to to be great for them to be average, too.

I think he was a helluva goalie. He had a great build for the position, strong, lanky, flexible, long-limbed. I think he was also a pretty influential goalie in getting guys to play the blocking style that's common in today's game. He was also pretty quick, really technically and athletically he had all you could ask for in a goalie.

The cap recapture thing does merit comment--$3M or so for the Canucks for three years, $1M or so for the Panthers--is that it seems like an odd decision to retire rather than go on LTIR. If he had done that, not only would the teams have their cap space in tact, but Luongo himself would have stood to earn over $3.5M for doing absolutely nothing. I guess he kind of stuck it to the Canucks. For the Panthers, they'd have to deal with a big salary on LTIR and pay out the cash. I am slightly surprised the Canucks didn't try to make a deal with them to smooth that over somehow. $9M in cap space over three years is pretty significant.