The Blue Jackets didn’t just add Carson Soucy on Tuesday. They squeezed him into their cap picture with barely any room to breathe.
Soucy agreed to a one-year, $1.15 million deal, a number that stands out because it’s neither a clean $1 million nor one of the more obvious round figures you might expect. The answer, as it turns out, is simple enough: the salary cap set the price.
That contract arrives after Columbus had already made a major roster shakeup Monday, when the club finalized its opening night roster and then pulled off the big blockbuster deal with the Maple Leafs just before rosters were due. Soucy’s signing had been on the radar for days, but it had to wait until the larger move was finished.
And Columbus needed him. Soucy impressed in camp, and the Jackets are dealing with a blue-line injury pileup that made another defenseman a necessity.
Damon Severson is week-to-week, Dante Fabbro is out 4-6 weeks, and Ivan Provorov was undergoing further evaluation yesterday. Even after Monday’s trade, the team likely would have needed Jake Christiansen to fill the No. 5 role on opening night.
That’s why the Blue Jackets had to make it work.
Soucy should get a real shot in Columbus right away, likely starting the season as a top-four option before sliding down once other defensemen return. For him, it’s a chance to rebuild his game at the NHL level. On the open market, he might have landed a slightly better deal, but he also may have been viewed as a No. 7 defenseman elsewhere.
Here, he gets a bigger opening.
The contract also leaves Columbus in a tight spot, with the club now just $150,000 from the NHL salary cap. That matters because the corresponding move was placing center Isac Lundestrom on LTIR.
Lundestrom’s contract is worth $1.3 million, and the team is expected to gain about $185,000 per month while he’s on LTIR. He’s expected to miss roughly the first month of the season.
The likely plan is to use the current roster with Soucy in place, bank nearly $200,000 in LTIR relief, and then, once Lundestrom is ready to return, send Danton Heinen’s $1 million contract to the minors. That would create enough space to activate Lundestrom and still stay under the cap.
It’s the kind of roster math that makes your head spin. But in this case, the Blue Jackets found a way to make the pieces fit.
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