Will Sabres Refuse To Use Their Cap Space At The Deadline Again?
Former Sabres captain Kyle Okposo was traded to Florida at the trade deadline last March. One year ago, before the NHL trade deadline, Buffalo Sabres GM Kevyn Adams said that he would not have an issue with his club acting as a middleman to facilitate a trade between two other clubs or to lower the cap hit to trade one of his players to a contender with limited cap space, but that it had to be worth it for the Sabres to do so.
"I had been approached on two or three occasions over the last week and I was absolutely open to doing it with the hesitation that we also knew we were going into today with unrestricted free agents, and I didn't want to block ourselves from having an opportunity to move someone because I use retentions," Adams said. "The retentions, if they were going to be of enough value, it would have been absolutely something we would have been ready to do.”
In the end, the Sabres made a pair of minor deals, swapping veterans Erik Johnson and Kyle Okposo for low-round draft picks, and in spite of each player having high cap hits, the Sabres did not retain any salary to increase their return.
Both New Jersey and Detroit acted as middlemen in trades this last week, with the Devils acquiring big Boston University winger Shane LaChance from Edmonton to retain 25% of Trent Frederic’s salary, while the Wings received a 2025 fourth round pick to absorb $1.3 million of center Yanni Gourde’s $5.1 million salary.
The Sabres are in a similar position this March, with a large amount of available cap space and several contenders seeking teams to broker a trade to lower the cap hit on players. Adams has not been available to the media since last December, but based on the organization’s standard operating procedure, they will likely not take advantage of the tools available to them to weaponize their cap space for assets.
Buffalo has two pending unrestricted free agents, Jason Zucker and Henri Jokiharju, after the announcement of a two-year contract extension to winger Jordan Greenway on Wednesday. With each player, the Sabres could retain up to 50% of their salaries for the remaining final quarter of the regular season. However, whether it is a budgetary or managerial philosophy, the club seems to refuse to use every tool available to it to better itself.
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