The Pittsburgh Penguins already have one goalie contract they don’t get a lot of on-ice results with, what about two? There is speculation the Penguins might weaponize their cap space, yet again. This time it involves the Canadiens Carey Price.
Price will not be lacing his skates up anytime soon. His playing days are over. The issue for Montreal is that he remains on the books and even if he is put on LTIR it can still pose roster flexibility issues.
Working in favor of the team acquiring Price is the fact he will be paid a signing bonus this Monday so the team acquiring won’t have to foot the entire 10.5M freight. The signing bonus is 5.5M out of the 7.5M in pay Price is due to be paid. This leaves only 2M for the acquiring team, which is very feasible.
Presently, the Canadiens are about 6M over the salary cap so getting the 10.5M off the books will give them some wiggle room to make an impact trade if they wanted.
The Penguins currently have about 13M in cap space so they could just eat the cap hit. They also have yet to trade away any of Erik Karlsson, Bryan Rust, and/or Rickard Rakell. If they were to do so that might bring them below the salary cap floor of 70.6M. Cap space isn’t an issue for this team. They remain a great candidate for this kind of trade which Dubas has shown a propensity to make with both Kevin Hayes and Matt Dumba.
I think this would be another smart move to collect more assets in a year they aren’t serious about competing. Dubas and the Penguins might as well continue to do this while they are not a salary cap ceiling team.
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