By Bob Trask – Earlier I took a look at the Habs salary cap situation an outlined a couple of options available to Kent Hughes. Today, I am presenting a hypothetical season-opening roster with the following assumptions:

• Jesse Ylonen and Alex Newhook will sign for the approximate amounts estimated by AFP Analytics
• Carey Price will be placed on LTIR
• Mike Hoffman, Chris Wideman and Rem Pitlick will be assigned to Laval if no trades are made

Roster

1	Jake Allen	$3,850,000
2	Samuel Montembeault	$1,000,000
3	Mike Matheson	$4,875,000
4	Kaiden Guhle	$863,333
5	Jordan Harris	$1,400,000
6	Arber Xhekaj	$828,333
7	David Savard	$3,500,000
8	Justin Barron	$925,000
9	Jonathan Kovacevic	$766,667
10	Nick Suzuki	$7,875,000
11	Kirby Dach	$3,362,500
12	Christian Dvorak	$4,450,000
13	Jake Evans	$1,700,000
14	Juraj Slafkovsky	$950,000
15	Josh Anderson	$5,500,000
16	Brendan Gallagher	$6,500,000
17	Joel Armia	$3,400,000
18	Jesse Ylonen (estimated)	$875,000
19	Cole Caufield	$7,850,000
20	Sean Monahan	$1,985,000
21	Alex Newhook (estimated)	$2,260,000
22	Rafael Harvey-Pinard	$1,100,000
23	Michael Pezzetta	$812,500
	Mike Hoffman ($1.15M buried)	$3,350,000
	Rem Pitlick (contract buried)	$0
	Chris Wideman (contract buried)	$0
	Edmundson retained	$1,7500,000
	Alzner buyout	$833,333
	Bonus overage penalty	$1,170,000
	Total	$73,731,666

This roster would have a cap hit of $73,731,666 leaving the Canadiens with $8,768,344 in cap space. If Price’s contract is added in to the totals, the cap hit would be $84,231,66 or above the season opening cap limit by $1,731,666.

Should the Canadiens want to maximize their LTIR flexibility, they could try to come as close as possible to the $82.5M cap limit on the opening day roster including Price’s contract. That would mean reducing the roster by $1,731,666 or as little above that as possible. How could that be done?

If Kent Hughes assigned Juraj Slafkovsky and Arber Xhekaj to Laval, the team would save $1,778,333 and put them within $46,667 of the salary cap. Both are ineligible for waivers so there would no risk in losing either player. It would leave the Canadiens with a roster of 22 players, one under the league maximum.

While it seems counter-intuitive to send two of your most promising young players to the AHL, it would be a paper transaction only. Once the season got underway, Price would be destined to LTIR while Slafkovsky and Xhekaj would reassume their positions on the Canadiens roster and bring the roster back up to a full complement of 23 players.

The end result is a massive amount of cap space. Hughes could use that at the trade deadline to acquire a player the Habs might desire or he could weaponize that cap space as a third party to facilitate a trade between two cash strapped teams.

The caveat is that another off-season trade could make this entire scenario irrelevant. But the goal here isn’t to predict the outcomes, it is to shed some light on some of the options the Canadiens’ disposal.