Another option is instead of trading Johnson, you can let gourde walk as a UFA, and you can have Andreoff slot into the 4th line LW role.

I think this is probably one of the most reasonable proposals I've seen. The only problem is Tyler Johnson's NTC, which I'm not sure he waives for NYI at this point. I think he might waive it to go to Seattle as he's from Washington, and I think Colorado or Carolina may also be decent. If he wants to win a Cup first, though, he very well may not agree to leave for NYI. I suppose it's more likely than him waiving an NTC to go to Ottawa under Melnyk, though. If necessary, you can put J.T. Miller into the trade instead, though, and then you can put Johnson in Miller's current spot. That's where Johnson played for most of the playoffs on the shutdown line that matched Taylor Hall and then the Bergeron line. From looking at stats, I think the Islanders are paying less than fair value, but the Lightning are in a tough spot to do anything about it since they need the cap space.

The Lightning will really have to hope that Seattle brings in a lot of extra revenue and the salary cap jumps, though, otherwise they may lose Cirelli, or even Vasilevskiy.



I don't know, I think Gourde provides a slightly more valuable role to the team than Johnson. He's great with forechecking, adds some physicality to the game (which the Lightning really do need), and scores almost as much as Johnson. He's also a bit more consistent and less streak-y. Considering Johnson can get them assets and Gourde would go for free, I think trading Johnson is the best option. If that's not an option due to NTCs, I would opt for trading J.T. Miller (although trading people before their contract begins like that is bad PR for Yzerman and may make it harder for him to continue to get team-friendly deals, which could turn out to be really problematic).

Yes, a big part of this roster involves guys waiving their NTC's, with Killorn having a full NTC until 2020-2021, Callahan submitting a 16 team trade list (likely to be contenders, who probably don;t have the space to sign him), and Johnson with the full NTC. What I have above is likely a perfect world scenario (minus the cap, which like you said in one of the posts, will probably go past 80M). Without these moves above (or something similar), TB doesn't have a lot of options for moving contracts (with Palat having a full NTC until 2020-2021 (a year too late for an ideal situation), and JT Miller just signing as you said. However, all of this is to clear cap space for EK, which as we determined is not as ideal as it seems, so realistically, only one of these contracts needs to go, and Callahan is likely to be gone soon.