Golden Knights’ salary cap maneuvering pays off at trade deadline

When Nicolas Roy made his Golden Knights debut Oct. 27 and scored his first NHL goal, the forward was handed the puck along with a boarding pass for a flight to Chicago.

This happened over and over with Roy. Defenseman Nic Hague had a similar experience riding the American Hockey League shuttle, and even top prospect Cody Glass wasn’t exempt from the paper trail.

From the outside, the moves may have appeared confusing at times, and the club’s reluctance to discuss the transactions only added to the intrigue.

But what the Knights did was accrue extra salary cap space that helped make the acquisitions of goalie Robin Lehner, forward Nick Cousins and defenseman Alec Martinez possible ahead of the trade deadline.

“We needed every thin dime for this to happen and then some,” general manager Kelly McCrimmon said Monday after the deals for Lehner and Cousins. “You don’t anticipate necessarily the possibility of bringing in a $5 million player (Lehner) on the final day of the trade deadline.

“All of those transactions over the course of a season helps us. It helps us be able to do the best job that we can to ice the best hockey team possible.”

Every team in the NHL stickhandles around the salary cap by assigning players on entry-level contracts to the minors without passing through waivers.

The Knights took it to the extreme, sending players up and down to the Wolves whenever there was a break in the schedule. Since Oct. 2, Roy has been involved in 26 transactions.

So, what exactly was the benefit of sending Roy, Hague and others back and forth to the AHL?

The salary cap is calculated daily, and in Roy’s case, the Knights banked almost $4,000 in cap space each day that he didn’t count against the cap, according to Dominik, the co-founder of hockey financial website CapFriendly who requested his last name not be used.

“They got to the trade deadline, I believe they were the equivalent of a $3.5 million player below the ceiling, which means that with all the space they banked, they were able to add a $3.5 million player the day they acquired Alec Martinez,” Dominik said.

McCrimmon said it was never discussed with Los Angeles to retain any of Martinez’s salary in that trade, though Dominik is suspicious that was the Knights’ intention all along.

Rather than using all their available cap space to take on Martinez’s $4 million salary cap hit, the Knights recalled Roy and defensemen Zach Whitecloud and Jimmy Schuldt to get as close to the salary cap ceiling as possible before placing forward Alex Tuch on long-term injured reserve to swing the trade.

“A quick-and-dirty option B,” Dominik said.

The three-way deal for Lehner was even more complicated, with Toronto and Chicago retaining $3.6 million of his $5 million salary to help facilitate the move to the Knights.

“I have never seen a trade like that. It had everything you could think of,” Dominik said. “At the end of the day, they shipped out Malcolm Subban and got Robin Lehner for $550K more. That’s amazing. That’s $550K prorated. I think it only cost them $140,000 in cap space. They really got creative. It was awesome to see.”

While the Knights’ salary cap benefits from the transactions, the players’ bank accounts suffer. Roy, for example, loses more than $3,500 in salary each day he’s not on the NHL roster.

According to CapFriendly, Roy has been in the minors almost 46 percent of the season and earned an estimated $264,180 of his maximum $700,000 salary as a result of the transactions.

“A lot of players, they start their career, they don’t go straight to the NHL,” said Roy, 23. “I’m not the only one. There’s a lot of guys doing it in the league. I’m willing to do that.”

The Knights probably aren’t done juggling the roster over the final 17 games to remain cap compliant.

Tuch’s status was upgraded Thursday, and he is day to day. When he returns from long-term injured reserve, the Knights must make a move to get under the salary cap.

It’s expected the Knights will reassign Whitecloud and/or Roy to get under the cap before one or both is eventually brought back.

Once the regular season ends, the salary cap is no longer a factor.

“This year really magnifies what will be the value of having the (new AHL) team across town,” McCrimmon said. “We’ve had some of these entry-level players endure some pretty strenuous travel for salary cap benefits.”

Contact David Schoen at dschoen@reviewjournal.com or 702-387-5203. Follow @DavidSchoenLVRJ on Twitter.