Bruins Shift Cap Hits to Florida

Like a little black dress, trading Long Term Injured Reserve contracts will never go out of style.

The Boston Bruins, in their effort to shake things up within their franchise, opened up some more tagging space for their off-season plans, as they were able to move Marc Savard's cap hit to Florida in a swap of young scoring wingers.

			2015		2016
To Boston	POS	Age	G/W	P	Cap
Jimmy Hayes	F	25	19	35	RFA
--------------
To Florida	POS	Age	G/W	P	Cap
Reilly Smith	F	24	13	40	$3.425 mil
Marc Savard	F	37	0	0	$4 mil

The Bruins receive the rights to Jimmy Hayes, who was starting to break out with the Panthers last season, but is in need of a new deal as a restricted free agent.  The Bruins are likely to save some cap money here as well, as they dealt Reilly Smith, who earned a pretty good contract after the 2014 season, but came up a bit short of the numbers that earned him that deal.

Both Hayes and Smith are your run of the mill 2nd-or-3rd line wingers, who should be able to pot 20 goals in a good year, but neither have really shown much consistency yet to say that they could do better.  The Bruins are hoping that a 35-point season will be an easier negotiation process than the 50-point season that Smith had in 2014, thus spending a little less against the cap next season.

The expectations for both players are also to be well entrenched in the hockey pool draft next year, good depth forwards in a deep draft.