For the second offseason in a row, the major question surrounding the New York Islanders has been how they’ll manage their difficult cap situation.
The team has shed $16.5 million so far this offseason with three major transactions, trading Nick Leddy and Andrew Ladd, before losing Jordan Eberle to the Seattle Kraken. The Islanders then proceeded to lock up defenseman Adam Pelech to an eight-year deal at a $5.75 million cap hit and are rumoured to have a six-year deal in place with forward Casey Cizikas, worth $2.5 million.
Given how few signings the team has announced, it’s pretty difficult to tell how much cap space they actually have. Below, I outlined some of the rumoured contracts and took guesses at projecting others, to try to figure out what the cap situation looks like right now.
The team currently has about $12 million in cap space, not including up to an extra $6 million the Islanders could gain by placing Johnny Boychuk’s contract on long-term injured reserve. If we factor Cizikas’ rumoured contract into the equation, the Islanders would have roughly $9.5 million left (plus LTIR space).
The team still has two key restricted free agents left to sign, in forward Anthony Beauvillier and goaltender Ilya Sorokin. As a quick guess, if each player receives a term in the range of three to four years, the Islanders could end up spending around $7.5 million per year on the two players combined.
We then need to account for new contracts for Kyle Palmieri, Zach Parise and Travis Zajac as well, considering all three players are expected to be with the team next season. No AAV has been reported for any of the contracts (that I'm aware of), though Palmieri is expected to have a long-term deal in place, while contracts for Parise and Zajac are reportedly each for a single year. Without doing a full projection, Palmieri’s AAV could be around $4 to $4.5 million, depending on the term, while it's a bit hard to predict deals for Parise and Zajac, but hopefully the Islanders wouldn’t have gone higher than around $1 to $1.5 million on either deal.
If we factor in those signings mentioned above, it would leave the Islanders with 16 forwards, six defensemen and two goaltenders under contract on the roster (using Sebastian Aho as the final defenseman). Obviously on a 23-man roster, the team would have to bury at least one forward contract in favour of another defenseman, but the cost of a contract for an extra defenseman would likely be pretty comparable to whichever forward is cut, give or take a bit of money. They'd also need to cut one other forward to get to 23 players but again, burying a different player like Ross Johnston in the minors would essentially cancel out the cost of a deal for Parise/Zajac.
This would mean the Islanders would have committed somewhere around $85 to $85.5 million against the cap in total with their 23-man roster. Considering they’d get up to $6 million in relief and the cap is at $81.5 million, this would leave the team with the ability to still spend around $2 or $2.5 million.
It’s not a ton of cap space considering the team still has holes to fill in the lineup, but if they can make deals involving retained salary and/or move Leo Komarov/Thomas Hickey, the Islanders could still have space to make more additions.
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