Evening Camp Demotions (Oct 6)

We're continuing to collect goaltending tandems across the league and on Thursday evening, Tampa Bay's was made official with the demotion of Kristers Gudlevskis, leaving Ben Bishop and Andrei Vasilevskiy to tend to the duties to start the year.  No surprises here and the story remains the same, as the expectation is that Tampa Bay eventually moves Bishop to help with cap room and expansion draft concerns and that Vasilevskiy will be the next starting goalie, but until that happens, this is Bishop's net and I think the Lightning are okay with that.

The Lightning are down to 26 players in their training camp and with a minimum of three cuts to make, they are already below the cap ceiling by $2.6 million, in fact.  Unfortunately, that's not enough to re-sign Nikita Kucherov, who is looking more and more like a holdout to start the year.

The news of Joonas Korpisalo's injury wasn't the only goaltending news from the Blue Jackets, as they have assigned Anton Forsberg to the AHL after their game against the Flyers on Thursday night, officially making Curtis McElhinney the back-up to start the season.  Forsberg was certainly the number four guy in line, so no surprise there, but the injury forced the hand of the club and they have decided to go with the veteran, in behind Sergei Bobrovsky for the time being.

One other notable cut from Blue Jackets camp was forward Sonny Milano, who looked to be in line for his rookie campaign in the NHL, but has been cut somewhat early, raising concerns that he may not even be an early call-up for injuries when the season starts, pending his performance in the AHL.  He was originally projected for 25 points, making him a fringe player, but that has now dropped down.

The Jackets have 28 healthy bodies in camp and four injuries to contend with as well.  The 32-man roster is $4.9 million over the cap ceiling, but they will certainly get plenty of relief from David Clarkson's $5.25 million, which will spend a good portion of the year on the LTIR.