irst of all, the Canadiens will be using the taxi squad to accrue cap space all season. Bergevin admitted as much. He is likely to have four players – Nick Suzuki, Jesperi Kotkaniemi, Alexander Romanov and Jake Evans – who will not require waivers to go back and forth from the taxi squad or even the Laval Rocket if need be. Every day any one of those players spends on the taxi squad or in Laval, the Canadiens are able to save that player’s daily cap hit.
So, for instance, Kotkaniemi’s daily cap hit is $7,974, which means for every day the Canadiens send him down, they would accrue that amount in cap space. For someone such as Perry or Frolik, that daily amount would be $6,466, and in the Canadiens’ situation, every penny counts. Then there are players with more term who make more money, someone like, say, Paul Byron, who has three years left at $3.4 million a year.
Byron’s daily cap hit is $29,310, but because you can bury a maximum of only $1.075 million of his contract, the Canadiens’ cap benefit for sending him to the taxi squad between games would be $1.075 million divided by the number of days in the season, 116. That amount comes out to $9,267 a day, and that number applies to any veteran the Canadiens might consider putting on waivers and sending down who makes at least $1.075 million a year.