CRANBERRY, Pa. -- The Penguins were in a bit of a tough spot when it came to the salary cap on this last road trip.
They had seven healthy defensemen at the start, until both P.O Joseph and Jan Rutta were injured in the opening game of the road trip in Washington.
Rutta ended up being good to go for the last two games of the trip in Toronto and Montreal, but Joseph remained sidelined with a nagging lower-body injury. Joseph's absence allowed Chad Ruhwedel to get back into the lineup on his off side, while Mark Friedman was recalled from Wilkes-Barre/Scranton as insurance to dress as the seventh defenseman.
Joseph was a full participant in practice at the Lemieux Complex on Monday. Friedman was returned to Wilkes-Barre the day before.
Friedman had been having a great season in the AHL to that point. He's physical, has been getting under the skin of opponents, pretty sound defensively, and is getting a lot of shots through to the net. Still, the decision to recall Friedman over his defense partner Ty Smith for that road trip was seen as an interesting choice by some.
Could Smith have come up at that time instead of Friedman? It's complicated. Here's how.
At the time Friedman was recalled, the Penguins had $1,286,666 in cap space. Friedman's cap hit is $775,000, while Smith's cap hit is $863,333. Both of those figures are obviously less than the Penguins' available cap space, but there's more involved than that.
When a team is using long-term injured reserve cap relief to recall a player -- as they were, with the relief from Teddy Blueger's cap hit -- a team has to have room for any potential performance bonus money in a player's contract, even if he isn't going to hit the marks required to receive those bonuses. You may remember that this is what prevented Drew O'Connor from coming up to the NHL at the end of last regular season -- The Penguins had roughly $1.2 million in cap space from Brock McGinn being on long-term injured reserve, and O'Connor's cap hit was only $925,000. But O'Connor's contract had an additional $850,000 in performance bonuses, making him unaffordable for the Penguins at the time.
Smith's current contract allows for up to $400,000 in potential bonuses, which means that the Penguins would have to have $1,263,333 in space for him in long-term injured reserve relief. They did have that space, with about $23,000 in room to spare.
The hold up, though, was that Filip Hallander was also recalled using long-term injured reserve money prior to the Washington game, and his contract allows for up to $132,500 in potential performance bonuses. The Penguins had enough cap space for the salaries of both Hallander and Smith, but they couldn't afford to account for potential performance bonuses for both players. They couldn't have both Hallander and Smith up at the same time.
Smith could have fit on the roster if there was a forward in Hallander's place whose cap hit was 886,666 or less (the Penguins' available cap space if Hallander's cap hit were removed and Smith's cap hit and potential performance bonuses were added.)
Someone with a league-minimum salary and not on an entry-level deal like O'Connor, Drake Caggiula or Alex Nylander would have fit the bid. So would have Sam Poulin, whose cap hit is $863,333 and has no potential performance bonuses in his contract.
The Penguins also had Kasperi Kapanen healthy scratched for that game in Toronto -- they could have sent Hallander down and had Kapanen get back into the lineup for that game, and not recalled an extra forward at all, or had one of the above recalls be insurance.
That means that the Penguins could have recalled Smith for the games in Toronto in Montreal and dressed him on the left side over Ruhwedel, had they replaced Hallander with one of Kapanen, O'Connor, Caggiula, Nylander or Poulin. That would have been a tough call given that Hallander actually had a pretty good game in Washington and didn't exactly deserve to be re-assigned.
Still, if the Penguins thought that Smith was an exceptionally better option than Ruhwedel for those games and worth that swap at forward, they could have done it.
When Smith was initially assigned to the AHL out of training camp, he wasn't entirely a cap casualty. Mike Sullivan acknowledged that Smith has a strong game offensively, but that he "has an opportunity to grow on the defensive side of the puck."
Smith has taken strides in that area since the start of the AHL season, but he still has room for improvement. When his defensive game is where the Penguins expect it to be, then he'll have a better shot at getting a call up.
