The Edmonton Oilers placed Matthew Savoie and Alec Regula on long-term injured reserve Thursday, hours before tonight's rematch in Vancouver.
Joshua Samanski gets the call. And the cap math behind the move shows just how tightly Stan Bowman has this roster wrapped.
Edmonton had only $303K in cap space before the LTI placements. Parking both players lets the Oilers exceed the ceiling by $1.43M.
After the recall, the remaining LTIR cushion sits at $762K. That's it. One more injury and the front office is doing math on a napkin.
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Losing Savoie stings. The young center dressed for all 82 games last season and scored 19 goals.
He came cheap, too. His $886,666 cap hit made him a bargain on a roster carrying $104,661,614 in projected charges.
Savoie did not dress in Tuesday's opener either. The Oilers dropped that one 6-5 in overtime to the Canucks on home ice.
Alec Regula exit thins Edmonton's blue line before Vancouver rematch
Regula's absence won't show up much on the scoresheet. He posted three assists in 29 games with Edmonton last season.
The -16 rating was harder to ignore. Still, he gave Mike Babcock a right-shot option on the back end when the lineup needed one.
The six defensemen who dressed Tuesday remain: Evan Bouchard, Mattias Ekholm, Jake Walman, Connor Murphy, Ryan Shea and Shakir Mukhamadullin.
Bouchard was the story in that loss. He scored three goals and added two assists, a five-point night from the blue line that still came up short.
Because the goaltending didn't hold. Tristan Jarry finished the opener with a .739 save percentage, and no amount of offense survives that for long.
So where does Samanski fit? The German center played 24 NHL games last season, scoring twice and finishing with four points.
The real production came in Bakersfield. He put up 31 points in 45 AHL games with the Condors.
He also chipped in two points in five playoff games for Edmonton. Small sample. But he's been here before, and that matters on a team with no room to experiment.
Running this roster with that little breathing room in the first week of October is like starting a road trip with the fuel light already blinking.
Bowman built the lineup around Leon Draisaitl at $14,000,000 and Connor McDavid at $12,500,000. That bill was always going to squeeze the bottom six.
It's a bad way to open a season. Every call-up from here becomes a cap decision first and a hockey decision second.
Puck drop tonight comes against a Canucks team that already beat Edmonton once this week. Seattle visits Saturday right after.
No timeline exists yet for either player. If another forward goes down before the Kraken come to town, Bowman won't have many doors left to open.
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Should Stan Bowman make a trade now to free up cap room after the Savoie LTI move?
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