As we see trades and moves made leading up to the NHL Draft and the start of free agency in early October, the picture is becoming more clear that it will be costly for clubs to clear salary with the cap remaining static at $81.5 Million.
At the 2019 NHL Draft in Vancouver, Toronto Maple Leafs GM Kyle Dubas had to pay the hefty price of a first round pick to the Carolina Hurricanes to take the final year of Patrick Marleau’s contract.
On Friday, Pittsburgh GM Jim Rutherford made his second major deal of the offseason, swapping forward Nick Bjugstad to the Minnesota Wild for a conditional 2021 seventh round pick. The trade was made for cap considerations, since the Pens added a $3.2 Million when they acquired Kasperi Kapanen from the Leafs last month.
Bjugstad is a former first-round pick of the Florida Panthers, who had 49 points in 2018 before being dealt to Pittsburgh in 2019. The 28-year-old played only 13 games for the Penguins last season and had season-ending back surgery, but is reportedly 100% healthy.
Unlike the Marleau situation, where the Canes had little interest in the 40-year-old winger playing for them and exacted a first rounder to buyout his $6.25 Million salary, Wild GM Bill Guerin (who was a former assistant GM under Rutherford) needed help up the middle with veteran Mikko Koivu heading to free agency or retiring and got Bjugstad at a discount with Pittsburgh retaining 50% of his $4.1 Million salary.
The Penguins essentially gave up a player that hardly played for them last season for nothing and opened up over $2 Million in cap space, when normally someone with Bjugstad’s pedigree would have rated a higher draft pick or player/prospect.
This will likely not be the last deal of this type made over the next few months, with teams reportedly sticking to internal budgets under the salary cap limit. For the Leafs, you could see players like Travis Dermott and Ilya Mikheyev taking short-term bridge deals for lesser money than expected and the club not qualifying arb-eligible RFA’s like Evan Rodrigues in hopes of getting them signed to a more economical cap hit.
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Leafs center Auston Matthews finished second in voting for the Lady Byng Memorial Trophy to Colorado’s Nathan MacKinnon. Matthews received 21 first place votes votes and amassed 616 points, but MacKinnon had 64 first-place votes and collected 984 points.
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