Siegel: Well, I think we can immediately knock off a couple guys who haven’t played much: Nic Petan and Kevin Gravel.
Now, we need two more from a group that includes Nick Shore, Jason Spezza, Martin Marincin, and Dmytro Timashov. If I’m the Leafs and I’ve watched Timashov the first couple weeks, there’s no way I’m risking him getting claimed on waivers. He only just turned 23 this month. And he’s cheap – $694,444 – and an RFA next summer.
So that means two from Shore, Spezza and Marincin. Who ya got?
Mirtle: I thought you were going to take a stand here. Jeez. Fine, I’m on it.
Agreed Petan (who’s on the trade block) and Gravel are goners. That gets them down to needing roughly another $1.25-million in space and having a 23-man roster.
Given all these players are right around league minimum salary ($700K), that means two more have to go in order to be compliant.
Let’s rank the other options in terms of likelihood they get claimed on waivers:
1. Timashov (probably given his age and point production early this season)
2. Shore?
3. Spezza
4. Marincin
The easiest thing to do would probably be to waive Marincin and one of Spezza or Shore. But that leaves you with only six defencemen and there’s a big road trip coming in a couple weeks. (Viva Las Vegas…)
So, are they stuck keeping Marincin and losing all three of their extra forwards here? That seems… ungood.