from Travis Yost of TSN,
One quick look at the Boston Bruins salary cap situation and you start to realize that new general manager Don Sweeney has his work cut out for him this summer.
The Bruins, like a handful of other teams around the league, are already pushed near the salary cap ceiling. Most estimates have the team with $4-million to $5-million in available cap space, though those numbers can change slightly depending on what the players do with the escalator clause built into the new collective bargaining agreement.
Even in a best case scenario, with a salary cap around $71-million for the 2015-2016 season, the Bruins are in a bit of distress.
Dougie Hamilton alone is going to command a rather hefty salary – even if the team plays hardball with the restricted free agent, and you can bet they will, there’s a very good chance he’ll eat into much or all of the remaining cap space left for the team this year. It doesn’t leave them any wiggle room to build around their core pieces – in fact, it barely lets them replace the holes being created by departing unrestricted free agents.
I do think the Bruins have one course of action to get out of trouble, though, and that is to part ways with Milan Lucic. There are two reasons for this, and they both tie back into life in the salary cap era. Lucic, on the final year of a $6-million average annual value contract, is set to become an unrestricted free agent at the end of next season. As with any unrestricted free agent (and doubly so for cap distressed teams), you never want to run into the position where you lose an asset for nothing.
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