Maple Leafs Trim Down

According to the cuts today and some cuts that were made in secret, the Maple Leafs now have a roster of 30 players and they can now start working some systems with the players that remain in camp and go from there.  My source for the updated list is here, the final cuts will be made on Monday, when the waiver wire opens again, if you've been keeping track at home.

From this look, a goalie, three defensemen and four forwards still to cut from the roster, which is a way over budget as it is.  There has been some scuttlebutt that the Leafs will try and rid themselves of Jeff Finger from their line-up, but that hasn't been confirmed or denied much lately.  It should be a fierce fight to the finish for this group though.

Forwards	Defense	Goalies
Phil Kessel	Tomas Kaberle	Jonas Gustavsson
Kris Versteeg	Dion Phaneuf	J-S Giguere
Nikolai Kulemin	Francois Beauchemin	James Reimer
Clarke MacArthur	Luke Schenn
Mikhail Grabovski	Carl Gunnarsson
Colby Armstrong	Jeff Finger
Tyler Bozak	Brett Lebda
John Mitchell	Mike Komisarek
Fredrik Sjostrom	Matt Lashoff
Mike Brown	Danny Richmond
Colton Orr
Tim Brent
Luca Caputi
Christian Hanson
Nazem Kadri
Jay Rosehill
Mike Zigomanis

Now that we've hit 30 players remaining on this list, I've combined all the numbers, so we kind of have a play-by-play how much each further cut takes away. Right now, I have this 30-player roster, plus one buyout and one cap overage penalty sitting at $66.3 million, which works out to be $6.9 million over the cap ceiling.  If Finger was the first to go, he would take that down by $3.5 million and the cap hit would certainly be more manageable at $3.4 million over and seven more players to dispatch of.

Then what?