I say they're bluffing and they'll call up Hague after whatever time the NHL closes their daily cap window.
How much daily cap space do they have today vs tomorrow?
It has to be the Engelland bonus payments, which would make any calculation impossible unless we know the exact numbers. I can't see any other reason for them to put the roster this way.
It may be that Kolesar looked good, but I think we can all agree that Kolesar as the 13th forward and running 5 defensemen is not as good as good as 12 and 6 with Hague, who is not a bum. There's no way Kolesar looked that good to justify a radical change that forces our defense to play 24 minutes each, with only 2 full pairings and an extra forward without a line.
The only reason I can see is Engelland's bonus from last season eating into this cap. I thought I remembered he got 450,000 in bonuses and if the team is paying that over two seasons that would take 225,000 off our cap this season.
We are currently 225,896 under the cap, according to Capfriendly, but I don't know that they take past season bonuses into account. I haven't seen a space for it like they do retained salary. It makes me wonder if they need Kolesar and not Hague because the extra 66,000 saved keeps us under. But then, Coghlan is over 8,000 cheaper than Kolesar and a defenseman. It's all weird.
However, I could the NHL modifying last season's bonuses off the cap because we can't know how much cap a team would have had at the end of the season to pay them off then, the season ended thirty days early, how did they calculate the cap for the entire year?
Maybe the team paid some of it then and the rest of the overage rolled to this season. We were up against the cap then, though, so it's not a given we paid any of it.
Long story short, I have no clue what's going on with our cap anymore.
