Saturday nights 9-4 shellacking of the Montreal Canadiens saw the return of several of the Bruins walking wounded, namely Brandon Carlo, Derek Forbort, Linus Ullmark and Matthew Poitras.
The return of Forbort meant that they could no longer use his $3 million cap hit as LTIR. The others were on regular injured reserve and thus just needed open roster spots for them.
To get cap compliant and roster compliant the Bruins loaned John Beecher and Mason Lohrei to the AHL’s Providence Bruins. That left the Bruins with just a 22-man roster with a projected cap hit at the end of the season of $84,125,717 if the roster remains unchanged. That’s still above the $83,500,000 upper limit but with Milan Lucic on LTIR, they can exceed the cap.
But there isn’t much breathing room.
Paper transactions we’ve become accustomed to seeing the Bruins make in order to bank cap space will be almost impossible to make going forward. Parker Wotherspoon was moved from an emergency recall yesterday to a regular recall. The emergency recall allowed for the Bruins to send him back down to Providence without the fear of losing him to waivers. But because Wotherspoon has played in 10 games (not counting the games played under emergency recall) since he last cleared waivers, then he must clear to be sent to Providence. The same applies to Jesper Boqvist, who played his tenth game last night.
Under the Collective Bargaining Agreement, a team can call up a player and that player can play in 9 cumulative games or be on the roster for 30 cumulative days since last clearing without fear of losing the player to waivers if they decide to loan the player to the AHL.
That leaves the Bruins without a player on the current roster to send down and call back up in order to bank some space.
Worse yet, the Bruins only have approximately $625,000 in LTIR space remaining. That’s not a lot of space to call someone up should another injury occur that they can not place on LTIR. Even worse yet? It leaves them basically nothing at trade deadline unless it’s salary for salary. All they can add is a $625,000 AAV and that’s below league minimum.
The general consensus among fans is to trade Forbort or Matt Grzelcyk. Well, this isn’t a PlayStation or Xbox game where you can just turn on easy mode and force a deal. You have to find a willing trade partner. Are there teams that would be willing to take on one of those cap hits? Probably, yes. But the fact is that if you are going to convince one of the less than a handful of teams to do so, you are going to have to add an asset to make it happen.
Another scenario brought up a lot is to just waive one of the two players and send them to Providence. Well, doing so would only save the Bruins $1,150,000, the maximum allowable to be buried in the AHL and not count against the cap. It gets more complicated when you start pro-rating it all because, as you know, the season is half over. You’ll just have to trust me when I say it amounts to less than $2 million in trade deadline space by making such a move.
Although limited, there are some limited options available to General Manager Don Sweeney and Assistant GM Evan Gold. But those options come with limited benefits.
Or, they could just stand pat since this was supposed to be a transition year anyway.
Dom - Hockey 