Don Sweeney moving cautiously on salary cap projections

SUNRISE, Fla. — Bruins GM Don Sweeney met up with the team here after attending the GM meetings in Boca Raton. And while news of the new projection for next year’s salary cap that put the number anywhere between $84 million to $88.2 million – up from this year’s $81.5 million – would seem like good news for a team like the B’s, Sweeney didn’t sound like a man who had the weight of the world lifted from his shoulders.

The number is just a projection, and the final number last year actually came in $1.5 million lower than the projection. And as he mentioned on trade deadline day, when he moved some money out, Sweeney reiterated that the team will be facing some overages, including Kevan Miller’s money that’s been carried on Long-Term Injured Reserve all season.

So when it comes to signing unrestricted free agents Torey Krug, Zdeno Chara, Jaroslav Halak or restricted free agents Matt Grzelcyk and Jake DeBrusk, every little bit helps, but the potential increase may not be the problem-solver some think.

“Your statement of having more money to spend is not a ‘throw-something-against-the-wall, fix-it mentality’ that we have,” said Sweeney. “We’re going to have overages this year. We’ve had injuries that are going to add up. When you’re a team that’s trying to be competitive and the business drives it that way, you’re going to be up against it and you’re going to have circumstances that handcuff you a little bit when you carry players on the cap for an entire season, injury-wise. They accumulate. You don’t get underneath that, and you have performance bonuses so you have to try to prepare to some degree. You just can’t kick that down the road every year. What you might perceive as a windfall, we’re thinking ‘Well, we have overages we have to account for for anyway, based on the team we’ve tried to be this year.’ There are variables involved here and we have to sort though some of them … We’re not hiding from the things we face. Those are real variables that enter into every discussion.”

In other news out of the meetings, Sweeney was encouraged about the recommendation to change the offside rule to have the plane of the blue line, rather than the blue line itself, to be the determining factor for what is or isn’t offside.

“We did a lot of work last year in tweaking some of the rules that were in place in terms of interpretations of them,” said Sweeney. “I think the linesmen would agree that it may be easier to determine … what’s on the plane of the line as opposed to what’s touching the ice. I think that is a more difficult determination to make. So hopefully we’ll continue to move in the direction that we all want. We still have to see if there’s anything that will come out of it as a result. But right now I think we’re moving in the right direction and we’ve done a good job.”

Sweeney also said that one of the new technology-laden pucks, which will be introduced for the playoffs as a part of the new puck and player tracking system, will be tested in the B’s game on Saturday against the Lightning. He’s confident the new biscuits – made of the same hard rubber but assembled around the technology – will hold up fine.

“There have been games where its already been used and our game (on Saturday) it will be used,” said Sweeney. “There’s nothing that indicates that there’s anything different with the puck that will have any effect at all. They’re just trying to make sure the actual technology will work and they’re testing. I think that’s the best word to use. They have to test and evaluate all the data that’s going to come as a result … The integrity of the puck has been unaffected.”

Lineup changes

B’s coach Bruce Cassidy inserted Anders Bjork into the lineup and took out Par Lindholm, moving Sean Kuraly over to center the fourth line. Bjork had been scratched in the previous two games…

Panthers goalie Sergei Bobrovsky, grinding through a disappointing first season in Sunrise, was a scratch with a lower body injury. Chris Dreidger, who went into Thursday’s game with a 5-2 record, a 2.35 GAA and .932 save percentage, got the call.

from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/2wuCN2W