With NHL final rosters (*) due to the league office Monday afternoon, Mayor’s Manor has learned the LA Kings have made one decision already — look for forward Andre Lee to make the club.
Now, the reason for that ‘*’ above, we’ll get to in a minute. It has more to do with some paper transactions and roster maneuvering that will likely be required to make the Kings salary cap compliant. This also has to do with injuries sustained by Drew Doughty and Arthur Kaliyev during training camp.
However, before we get to all that, let’s at least briefly pause to acknowledge the work put in by many people to get Lee ready for this moment. First, credit to Mark Yannetti and the Kings scouts who saw enough in the big Swede to take him in the seventh round at the 2019 Draft.
History shows, the odds of a seventh rounder making it to the NHL is extremely small. Yet, Lee is on the doorstep of becoming another in a long line of late round picks that Yannetti and crew have seen turn into tangible players in Los Angeles, including Jordan Nolan (RD7, 2009) and Matt Roy (RD7, 2015). Expanding the list to also include seventh rounders that have gone on to play meaningful games with other clubs, players like Nic Dowd (500 games and counting) and Jacob Middleton (239 games and counting) are added to the mix. It’s a rather astonishing stat when compared to the hit rate of other NHL teams that late in the Draft.
Full credit should also be given to Lee himself. He moved here from Sweden in 2018 to join the Sioux Falls Stampede, scoring 20 goals that season and winning the USHL championship. Three years of college hockey at UMass-Lowell further helped his development. And then he spent the last two years with AHL Ontario, where his package of size and skill — and probably snarl, if you ask coach Jim Hiller — really started to fit together as the total package.
From what Mayor’s Manor has learned, Lee has played his way onto the team by outplaying other players in camp.
This shouldn’t really come as a surprise either, as Hiller was highly complementary of Lee earlier this week, when we asked what he needed to do to make the final roster:
More on Lee can be found here:
What About the Math of It All?
This is where things get a little dicey. Yet, we’ll try to break it all down in a way that makes sense.
Let’s start with the following roster and salary cap outlook:
Arthur Kaliyev and Drew Doughty are in yellow because they’re currently injured. However, putting them on IR won’t help because they’re cap money would still be on the books in that case. Meaning, the above roster of 25 players would become 23 active players plus two guys on IR.
Again, though, they don’t have enough cap space to do that. Look at the lower number in the bottom right corner. The Kings would be $277k over the salary cap.
They are a few other things in play here:
1. Use Fagemo to Become Cap Compliant
This would free up $775k in cap space and make the team cap compliant. Yes, it would risk him to waivers, where he could potentially be claimed by another team before having an opportunity to be assigned to AHL Ontario. That’s the cost of the trade off in this scenario, though.
2. Why Not Just LTIR Somebody?
This is going to involve math. Feel free to skip ahead to No. 3 if you’d like.
Some people have asked, ‘Why haven’t the Kings just put Doughty on LTIR and used that money to make a trade?’
There are a few good reasons actually. For starters, putting a player on LTIR doesn’t really ‘save’ a team money (remember that word for later). Instead, it frees up money that can be used for a specific period of time. Meaning, put Doughty’s $11M on LTIR doesn’t save the team $11M. Even he misses half the season, they don’t save half of his $11M. Instead, essentially what happens is they get a temporary reprieve from his $11M being on the books. So, if they were to then use that new-found cap space to trade for a player making $7M, they could afford said player — for now. What happens when Doughty comes back in a few months? How would they get cap compliant? To add his $11M back onto the books, they would now need to shed money to make room for him.
On the other hand, there is a way to actually ‘save’ cap money and use it later (i.e. at the Trade Deadline). For example, if the Kings spent $87M of the $88M cap available — and this is important, without having anybody on LTIR — that $1M gap gets accrued in actual cap savings.
For simple math, let’s assume the Trade Deadline took place at exactly the halfway point of the season, that would be an extra $500k in savings the Kings would have available (half of the $1M). Thus, that’s more cap money to acquire a more expensive player.
Why does this matter? Because if a team is up against the cap ceiling, they want to bank as much savings as possible. This gives them extra money to work with later. It’s one of the few ways to actually manufacture cap dollars out of thin air. And this can only happen if teams don’t have any players on LTIR.
Once a team places a player on LTIR (and they use some of that money to round out their roster), they’re no longer eligible to ‘save’ money. Instead, they’re ‘borrowing’ cap money from the player on LTIR. It’s one or the other, not both.
So, let’s circle back to the present. Do the Kings want to place Doughty or Kaliyev to become cap complaint? No, probably not. They’d likely prefer to ‘save’ cap money instead.
It might just not be possible given what they really want to do, which brings us to point No. 3.
3. What About Jones and 8D?
If they can, the Kings would like to carry eight defensemen into opening night, especially considering the long road trip they have scheduled to open the season.
Caleb Jones is the guy they’re considering carrying in the spot. Again, it comes down to how to make the math work.
What the Kings submit as their ‘final roster’ on Monday, might not be the roster they have a few days later… and it’s all legal.
The Kings went through something similar last year. It was dizzying, so we won’t go through it all again. Just note that there can be some transactions between ‘final rosters’ being due to the league office on Monday and Game 1 in Buffalo on Thursday.
While nothing is finalized as of now, it could very well work like this:
GM Rob Blake submits a final roster to the NHL showing 22 players, plus Doughty and Kaliyev on IR. It would look like this:
That’s 22 players, with the two yellow boxes on IR. It leaves them with around $497k in cap space. .
Wait, what happened to Lee?
Exactly!
To make the roster compliant on Monday, Lee would need to be assigned to AHL Ontario. He could be chosen for this temporary paper transaction because he is waiver exempt. Jones is not. He’d require waivers.
So, how would they get Lee on the roster before they play the Sabres?
The Kings could then — let’s say, next Wednesday — place Kaliyev on LTIR to free up the cap space needed to add Lee back to the roster, giving them an opening night roster of:
Laferriere – Kopitar – Kempe
Jeannot – Danault – Moore
Fiala – Byfield – Foegele
Lee – Turcotte – Thomas – Lewis
Anderson – Spence
Gavrikov – Burroughs
Edmundson – Clarke
Englund – Jones
Rittich
Kuemper
That’s 23 active players. Doughty would be on IR, and Kaliyev would be on LTIR. The Kings would not be ‘saving’ any money against the cap until after Kaliyev came off of LTIR.
Only For the Cap Math Lovers
WARNING: If you don’t like math, skip this section.
One final note re: possible paper transactions next week. When they’re ready to put a player (either Doughty or Kaliyev) on LTIR, the preferred way of doing it is to get as close to the cap ceiling as possible. It’s just the way LTIR math works. In that case, the Kings may actually do a few more moves than simply sending Lee down to close that cap gap as tight as they possibly can.
If they wanted to, they could send Brandt Clarke down for the day. He’s exempt from waivers and carries an AAV of $863k. If they recalled Liam Greentree and his $975k cap hit, it would close the gap by an extra $100k or so and help maximize their LTIR position. However, that’s a lot of work for little return. They could so put Doughty on LTIR and not worry about it, as he opens up more LTIR money to play with than Kaliyev.
However, it all comes back to who is likely to return sooner. Because remember, the Kings want to exit LTIR as quickly as possible, so they start saving cap dollars for potential future trades. Teams can only do that when they are out of LTIR.
If your head is spinning, here’s the simple story:
Andre Lee is on track to make the Kings opening night roster. They’ll likely carry 8D, as well, with Caleb Jones joining the club. To get there, LA will likely make a series of otherwise odd paper transactions to make all the math work. Be patient early next week, it will all make sense in the end.
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