GMlizard
Registered User
- Jul 23, 2022
- 22
- 20
That is a nasty way to go through a long season. You hope someone gets injured and have to guess who might be taken for free from the waivers. If you go a long way without injuries, the guys sitting down will loose their flow and tension starts to rise. And each team will be looking at the waivers just to Arizona you for fun.The more I look into it, it is dawning on me that the extreme cap crunch explanation of the trade is 100% false.
For reference, in today's Athletic Porty drew up a 22 man roster with $3.8m to spare. Bjorkstrand's cap is $5.4m, so we really only needed a bit over $1.6m to squeeze under with a 21 man roster. That means that the list of ways to make it under is very long. You actually don't need to trade anybody this summer.
For instance you could send Kuraly and Bean to Cleveland for a week or a few weeks until somebody gets injured (or until injuries elsewhere means a mutually advantageous trade is possible). And for those of you who think we wouldn't do something so rude to Kurls - we just dumped our homegrown hero and top goal scorer on his honeymoon. Temporarily waiving guys is something Toronto has done recently.
Perhaps that sort of temporary AHL maneuver is something you greatly want to avoid - I would agree - but think of it as the worst case scenario if a trade doesn't pop up between now and game one of the season. That's the worst that could happen if we can't find a trade, and Jarmo still chose to dump Bjorkstrand months in advance.
The real answer here is that Jarmo wasn't as attached to Bjorkstrand as most of us are. Maybe he wasn't part of the long term plan anyways, maybe he wanted to clear space on the scoring lines for one of his half dozen ELC kids. The timing of the move would still be explained by the cap. He can go over the cap in the summer and there are several clubs that routinely go over until the season starts, but Jarmo has never done that and in this case could stay under by moving someone who wasn't a part of the long run plan and was getting in the way of his young players.