Late Night Cuts in Montreal

After a major round of cuts and sending some junior players back down, the Canadiens had another preseason game against the Florida Panthers. After that game, the team decided to make a few more cuts, bringing their roster down to 31 players, which includes a number of injuries, so its safe to start posting the roster now.

Currently, I have the Canadiens total roster has 18 forwards, 10 defense and three goalies, but the team currently has serious injuries to Andrei Markov and Roman Hamrlik, while the other four in red below are all out with minor injuries and are considered to be day-to-day.  If the day-to-day players can make their way into being healthy again, there likely is a chance they'll feature in one of the team's last two preseason games, which go at the end of the week.

For the most part now, the cuts will likely be somewhat minor and the players that go down now will also likely be the first call-ups when more injuries hit the team or just general inconsistencies.

Forwards	Defense	Goalies
Tomas Plekanec	Andrei Markov	Carey Price
Scott Gomez	Roman Hamrlik	Alex Auld
Mike Cammalleri	Jaroslav Spacek	Curtis Sanford
Brian Gionta	Alexandre Picard
Andrei Kostitsyn	Hal Gill
Benoit Pouliot	Josh Gorges
Dustin Boyd	Ryan O'Byrne
Jeff Halpern	Alex Henry
Travis Moen	P.K. Subban
Max Lapierre	Yannick Weber
Tom Pyatt
Hunter Bishop
Mathieu Darche
Lars Eller
Ben Maxwell
Max Pacioretty
Ryan Russell
Ryan White

Since there is a chance that Markov and Hamrlik will both be back in the line-up before the end of October, there is little point in eliminating them from the cap calculation, so we'll run with all 31 players, a buyout and a cap overage penalty when we look at their annual cap projection. Currently, I have the Canadiens sitting at $64.2 million, $4.8 million over the salary cap ceiling. The team does, in theory, have to cut a minimum of eight players when its all said and done, which at league minimum (which they are not all making) each would already be $4 million, so the Canadiens should be safe when the deadline hits.