I’m assuming pure cap move that kind of skirts the rules a bit… if the player is cool with it…but may be wrong and it’s a pure cap move plus Lemieux wanting to get a form of conditioning assignment while we get some banked cap dollars benefit..
Expectation is Lemieux doesn’t play until there is an injury with the nhl roster….. Blake has now settled things for Rod and it will take a few bad games from him to rotate him out…. So better to risk trying to send down lemieux when no one really paying attention after he has been scratched and not on teams radars so we get some cap relief…
He could clear and he goes nowhere… stays with the team and we don’t force him to go down as part of our agreement with him.. so he just sits in the press box same as he is currently doing and we get banked cap space until he is needed to play…Whereby we do an “emergency call up for injury purposes which allows us to play him for a period of time and then “send him back down” to “Chicago” without needing another waivers if the injured nhl player comes back inside the window of the rules for emergency call ups for waiver electively players..
He is on a one way so he gets paid the same nhl salary sitting in the press box, practicing and traveling with the team as he would playing in Chicago…. We could have an agreement with him not to send him down and he stays with the team….
Or it could really be he wants to get a few games to keep up his game shape in the case of an injury…
Either way we clear a few more bucks off our daily cap hit so we can bank more cap per day towards the trade deadline than we currently are with him fully on the roster…. It’s not a huge amount as he is on a league min type deal… but every bit helps when we are trying to bring in a more expensive contract at the deadline…
Will be interesting to see if it was a pure paper move and he stays with the team after he clears or if he does go down so he can play in Chicago… maybe they have a need for him or he wants some game action and to help that young team…
ETA: he might not get to travel with the team while he is “assigned”…. I’m trying to remember the couple other times we kind of did this on paper but didn’t actually send the player down like the Martinook waiver thing to start the season, etc.. basically where the line is before it becomes cap circumvention and raises the ire of the other teams…, if Lemieux is happy and in on it, and he gets his full salary no matter what and others had the chance to claim him, whether he has to actually report is not is where this gets fuzzy for me… so may be a lot of my rambling can be ignored and it really is a true assignment because overall the team wants the cap banking most of all in this situation or they wouldn’t be doing it.. I doubt they want to send Lemieux down if he doesn’t want to go and lose the nhl level amenities for riding the bus even with Chicago being a higher end AHL situation..
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