$300k left and not even a full 23 man roster. One injury and the team is screwed....good job.

Wow that's an overpayment for that player.

Umm not quite? More like 3 injuries, or 2 injuries to the same position group, and the team would need to exercise LTIR more so than they did this past year.



Care to specify?

One down Krejci to go, maybe has to waive no trade.

That trade makes BOS worse today and in the future. Wouldn't advise it.

Krug is a very good dman....better than Slavin, likely for a number of years yet.

You realize for a guy to go on LTIR they need to miss a minimum of 10 games or 24 days of the NHL season right?

If someone goes down because they tweek something and they are only going to miss a week...well you can't put them on LTIR. Better hope you don't have a goalie that goes down for a week or two because you wouldn't be able to bring anyone up.

Okay, this is complete and utter horsesh*t. I'm not even going to argue this point because you're obviously either a brainwashed fanboi or an imbecile, but it had to be called out.

Sorry, but even as a huge Krug guy, myself, you can't be serious with this. Krug is probably better offensively but overall? I'm taking Slavin 11 times out of 10. Better contract, better overall, younger, and offensively, it's close. Krug is a very good defenseman. I agree there. But you totally lose me saying he's better than Slavin.

Yes, I am quite aware. I'm also aware of something called a daily cap hit. Are you? Just because a player's annual cap hit might cause the Bruins to exceed the cap if he played an entire year doesn't mean that player playing a spot game or two would actually cause them to exceed the annual cap hit for the year. Granted, with 300K+ in cap space, there is a lot less wiggle room than if you had say 1M+ in cap space. You might also be projecting anxieties based on how many injuries the team suffered last year. But are you aware that in the 5 instances the Bruins would have been eligible to invoke LTIR because of an extended absence due to injury for one of their players, they only invoked it 1 time (Adam McQuaid when he broke his leg). Ryan Spooner, Noel Accari, David Backes and Anders Bjork all had injuries that lasted a month or more, and none of them went on LTIR.

And before you say "well, some of those injuries were predicted to be day-to-day" - you can invoke LTIR retroactively.

Personally, I don't relish the idea of trading Krug away. I only did it to make the salaries work, and because everyone in the MSM who is writing about a potential trade scenario between Carolina and Boston continues to include his name in such a trade. If this trade, or something like this, became a reality, I would hope the Bruins would do it. But for the life of me I don't understand why Carolina would ever be interested in trading Slavin away for anything less than a king's ransom (which of course the Bruins shouldn't do).

I’ve heard slavin’s name has been added to Aho for players they’re not trading.

I'm well aware of the daily cap hit lol. Ask any GM how they feel about $300k in cap space with only 22 guys on the roster. I bet you don't find a single one that would do it lol.

Then there is sanity in the world. Source?

Sure, I'd love to. I just happen to have all 31 GMs numbers in my phone. So I'll ask them "If you can fit John Tavares on your roster at 10M/year and you have 22 roster players, including guys like Bergeron, Marchand, Pastrnak, Krejci, McAvoy, Carlo, Slavin etc, with 300K in cap space, would you go for it?" Betcha I'll definitely find at least 1 lmao.

Great, I look forward to hearing what the results are

Instead of bothering all of my friends lol, why don't I use this as evidence?

https://www.capfriendly.com/archive/2018

Seems like there are quite a few teams year after year who build their rosters in such a way that they end up with 300K or less in cap space?

I believe it was McGuire on the radio. I read it off HFboards though. I’ll try and find it.

Ya by the end of the year after the TDL when roster limits go away lol.

Lol oh please. Very few teams exceed 23 (healthy) roster players even after the roster expands. Boston didn't do it this year? The era of calling up players from the minors just to have them sit around and do nothing is thankfully dead. It has sort of been replaced by signing college players, but usually those guys either play in the NHL or head to the minors.

Well for Boston, the Baby B's were in the playoffs so I wouldn't imagine they would call anyone up. Once the season ended though, they had quite a few guys get called up during the playoffs.

Listen we can go back and fourth on this all day, but the reality is, JT isn't signing for $10.5 million a year. Someone will give him more than that to be their #1 center. Do I think he's worth more? no, not really but I'm sure someone in desperate need of a franchise player thinks he's worth more.

We could go back and forth, and who wouldn't love that lol? But I just gotta clarify:

1. When the season ends, the salary cap no longer exists. There is no salary cap in the playoffs. So that really isn't relevant to the issue of not having enough players on hand in a cap crunch.

2. I don't recall hearing of any players being called up from Providence after they were eliminated from the playoffs? I certainly could have missed something, but could you name who the Bruins did call up?

3. I agree that realistically the Bruins probably won't be signing Tavares; but that's more so a product of Sweeney's lack of vision with FAs and unwillingness to pursue Tavares. However, when Tavares does sign his new contract, unless the team name is "Montreal" or "Buffalo", I would not expect his contract to be outside of that 10-10.5M range. Any team that Tavares would realistically like to go to (Toronto, Sharks, Knights, Penguins) are not going to be able to afford much more than that. And from all the media speculation about Tavares desire to leave NYI due to lack of organizational competitiveness, why would he want to sign with one of those teams that could pay him a max contract and then suck for the rest of his career? Yes he's been underpaid for the last few years, but 70-73.5M on a 10-10.5M/year contract is certainly nothing to sneeze at if he's looking to get paid and be competitive?

Wasn't really talking playoffs, more so from post TDL to end of the regular season.



Per transactions the following players were recalled on May 2nd, 2018:

Anton Blidh
Austin Czarnik
Chris Breen
Colby Cave
Jakob Forsbacka-Karlsson
Jakub Zboril
Jordan Szwarz
Paul Postma
Tommy Cross
Zach Senyshyn
Zane McIntyre



Not sure I'd say Sweeney as a lack of vision with FA's as much as he just envisions building the team via the draft. Boston has quite a few RFA's coming up that they need to be mindful of and keep some flexibility to make in season moves. In this example you've done, we'll have roughly $17 million in cap space next off-season (assuming $82 million ceiling) with McAvoy, Carlo, Donato, JFK, Heinen, Chara and then guys to fill in the rest of the roster. Now you could pay someone to try and take Backes or Krejci, but that's going to cost you some significant assets. Is it possible? sure, but its not very probable.

Trust me I've played around with the idea of JT as early as last year on this site. I just remember the days 3-4 years ago when we were tight to the cap and it hindered us from making significant moves (thanks PC) and I really don't want to go back to that.

Well I stand corrected! I guess they did call up players after Providence got eliminated. But, originally what I was arguing against was more along the lines of if the AHL team is still playing and NHL team calls up players who don't play when they could be playing in the AHL. This is the practice I have issues with, especially when a team only gets 4 call ups after the trade deadline til the end of the regular season. But Providence's regular season ended April 15th, well into the NHL playoffs. So the roster limits and the cap limits don't matter at that point, which is what I meant when I said very few teams exceed the 23 man roster limit (i.e. during the regular season).

If the Bruins felt they were truly challenged to sign RFAs in the 2019 offseason (in this hypothetical model), they'd have options available to them. Instead of trying to convince Backes to waive his NMC or finding a trade partner for Krejci, they could buy Krejci out. But that would only be if they truly felt a cap crunch in 2019 if they followed these moves for the upcoming offseason. If they were to hypothetically do this scenario (or the other scenario I proposed involving Hanifin), they wouldn't be re-signing Heinen to anything because he'd be gone, and I would imagine it would be Chara's last year before retiring (and with Tavares in the lineup, JFK wouldn't be getting a lucrative extension because he'll still have been in the AHL).

I hear you on the concerns about being tight against the cap. I just don't think that's a concern here. It's one thing to be tight against the cap because you've got Kelly and all those 4th liners on overpayments, it's quite another to be "potentially" tight against the cap because you've got a 1-2-3 of Bergeron, Tavares and Krejci. If for no other reason than to keep him away from Toronto (who I think would be the front runner for him if he did leave Long Island), the Bruins should pursue Tavares if he becomes a UFA, but also because their center men are about to become old very soon and no one can say JFK, Frederic, or Studnicka are surefire bets like a Top 10 draft pick. Tavares provides a perfect bridge between Bergeron and Krejci to those aforementioned guys if they are the real deal, or buys the Bruins time down the road with a Tavares-Bergeron combo to allow them to find the "next guy(s)" if those prospects don't work out.

And all it would cost is "maybe" not keeping one of those prospects around...

Also, in scanning the transactions list between February 27th and April 7th (and in the case of the Bruins, going to April 8th), there were only 56 call ups made by the eventual 16 playoff teams. More than half of those were goalies, and none of the teams made mass call ups similar to what the Bruins did on May 2nd.