Équipe: 2020-21 Islanders de New York

Date de création initiale: 8 août 2020

Publié: 8 août 2020

Mode - plafond salarial: Basique

Boychuk and Ladd have both had injury riddled careers and both sustained injuries this year. Boychuk in particular left the playoffs with a head injury. I feel like people are exaggerating how hard it is to get players on to the LTIR. Quality of Life concerns abound for those two. The Leafs have done it. The Isles have done it before with Visnovsky. The Isles should be able to do it here.

With all that said, I think the Isles should be just fine from a cap perspective so long as they can use the LTIR to keep Boychuk and Ladd on the books but not count towards the cap. They could go for a bigger piece like Hall or Hoffman, but I think with future cap concerns being what they are, I think a short term piece that fits perfectly into Trotz' system would work just fine. This would also leave more space to give all of Barzal, Pulock and Toews longer term deals. This team desperately needs stability. We've had too much UFA heartbreak for too long, let's just keep the main pieces in house and grow them into stars.

To handle next year's cap concerns, we can buyout Komarov (1,666,000 penalty next year, 660,000 penalty the following year; sounds like a great deal to me) and trade Bailey and/or Varlamov. Bailey's looked good and Varlamov has looked great this playoff series.