The point of this 21 player roster is to get the Senators temporarily up to as close to 83.5M as possible before placing Voracek and Little on LTIR. Ignore the actual line combos, I don't intend to decide who will play where.

1 - The Senators trade Brannstrom to Arizona. Ideally, the Senators could trade Brannstrom somewhere for a late pick and keep it simple, but I don't think there would be a market for that. The idea behind the trade is that the Senators take two insured LTIR contracts from the Coyotes, which makes Brannstrom a cash in/cash out acquisition. Soderstrom does come back to Ottawa, but he is not integral to the trade. It can be a different depth defender, or no defender at all with a mid-to-late draft pick instead, with the Senators raiding PTOs for a defenseman. The entire point of the trade is to get rid of Brannstrom's cap hit in exchange for LTIR contracts. Given how close the Senators will be to the cap ceiling, there are less consequences to going into LTIR since they will have so little cap space to bank going into the deadline anyways.

2 - Joseph will be sent to the minors. The Senators need the 1.125M in cap relief and he played his way off the team last year.

3 - Forsberg will start in the minors. He is very unlikely to be claimed because of his term, cap hit, and injury history. This will give Forsberg starting time in Belleville to get his game back on point after suffering a double-knee injury last year. It is also essential in order to free up cap space for Pinto. The difference between Sogaard and Forsberg is 200k. If Forsberg is claimed, that isn't the worst problem to have since Sogaard is ready to play 20-30 NHL games a year, but he almost certainly won't be claimed.

4 - I opted to send down Kelly (waiver eligible) and Soderstrom (waiver-exempt), and recall Jarventie (waiver-exempt). The purpose being that gets the Senators within a few hundred dollars of the cap ceiling so that when they place Voracek and Little on LTIR, they get the highest possible cap ceiling under LTIR. They can then send Jarventie back down and recall Soderstrom, or do whatever other tweaks they need to do.

5 - Depending on who makes the team in each depth spot, they may have to place different depth players on the opening night lineup to maximize LTIR.

but the sens are the Canadian coyotes and are also cheap

But the yotes want them to get to that cap floor so they wont trade then regardless of salary owed

Not anymore. King Andlauer is in the house.

Not a really interesting trade for the Coyotes and good luck running with a 21-man roster with $895K in cap space the whole season.

The Coyotes are well above the cap floor without those two contracts. They don't need them. They would be at about 67M after that trade.

The Coyotes have a mandate to compete this season. They are still a budget team, but they are no longer leveraging their cap space to accrue assets. They want to leverage it to ice the best possible roster. While Brannstrom is done as a top prospect, he's still a solid #5 who can play 18 minutes a night and has upside to possibly become a second pair D, or QB one of the two PP units in Arizona while playing on the bottom pair at ES. Given that they would gain salary space in the transaction by dumping two contracts for players that won't play for them, it seems sensible.

It's 953 dollars worth of cap space actually.

That's the situation the Senators are in, there is no way out of it short of waiting for Norris to injure his shoulder again.

Sens are no longer a budget team. Which I miss in a way. Even Dorion recently commented on how they now don't have to account for sending 1-way contracts to the minors, because they have the spending power to do that sort of stuff without it negatively affecting them. (They have sent guys down in the past, but it's always been a big deal last resort sort of thing)

The first paragraph is correct. The 2nd just explains what they already plan to do with söderstrom, plus he’s a rhd which is more valuable anyways. The trade doesn’t work for Arizona at all.

As stated in my post, you can take Soderstrom out of the deal entirely, or replace him with another six figure depth D. Getting Soderstrom back is useful, but not the key component of the deal.

The main component for the Senators is moving out cap with only LTIR cap coming back.

The main component of the deal for Arziona is that it is 2.25M in money out, and 2.00M in money in. With the context being the 2.25M is to pay players not to play, while the 2M gives them a roster player. Additionally, since Brannstrom almost certainly makes their NHL roster, it's really only 1.25M+ in, because that means someone on a 2-way contract of 775k or more gets sent down to the AHL as Brannstrom takes their spot. So that's nearly a million in real money savings and they get a bottom pairing D/PP QB with some slight upside.

A more ideal trade for Ottawa would be Brannstrom somewhere for the best possible non-cap asset (even if that is only "future considerations"), but I don't think a team would take him at 2M. There just isn't much cap to go around right now.

Soderstrom is still waivers exempt so that is a plus. If it makes it work with the cap then I'd be ok with this

I wanted to trade Brannstrom for a young forward but that could work as well, although the defense is already very crowded for now and the future

Also good for the Yotes because Brannstrom is quite good at this thing called hockey

Brannstrom still has potential to be a very useful #4 defenceman. At worst, he's a bottom pairing defender who could PP the #1 unit on a less talented team, or a #2 unit on a good team. The reason he is expendable has more to do with Ottawa's team makeup than Brannstrom's trajectory.

He's probably worth a 3rd-4th round pick at the trade deadline, but he might have negative value right now. It's the most difficult possible time to move out salary cap. Look at how Vancouver just paid a 3rd round pick to move out Tanner Pearson on an expiring contract at a net cap of 1.45M (3.25M minus DeSmith's 1.8M hit going back to VAN).

I agree that we can afford to trade Brannstrom because Kleven is coming up and fits more the team plans

However I disagree that he'd have negative value right now, his metrics last season were more than excellent, they have shown that he was actually too good for a 3rd pairing. And he proved it when Chabot was injured as he looked even better in games where he played more minutes

Did you know that he has averaged 24 pts per 82 games over the last 3 seasons, since he was 21 y/o? If he just adds a little bit offense he would become a very hot commodity as he just turned 24 y/o and is still on his RFA years

Pearson on the other hand only played 14 games last season and didn't have great production in the last 3 seasons. He's not very good defensively so he has to produces to have value

The issue is that we are in the worst time all season to dump cap space. Less than a third of the league have the cap flexibility to add a 2M player. Out of those 10 or so teams, a few of them are budget teams. Which means even if they have the cap, they do not have the spending to back it up.

A team would give up an asset for Brannstrom at the trade deadline, since they could acquire him as either a rental (by not qualifying him) or a long term piece, and it is easier to fit in cap at the deadline. I don't think there would be a market for Brannstrom (or Kubalik for that matter) right now without cap coming back, because cap is too valuable and scarce. Cap coming back defeats the point, unless it is LTIRetired players that can be placed on LTIR to raise the Senators ceiling once they hit 83.4XX.

The above is the thinking behind Brannstrom and the ARZ trade. Yes, it would be much easier if it could just be Brannstrom to whoever for a draft pick, I just don't think that's likely.

I was not arguing about that, just when you said "he might have negative value right now", quality players don't have negative value. It's like saying that Chabot has negative value because 8 M$ in cap space is very scarce. All players are hard to move right now. Even if Edmonton suddenly says, you can have McDavid for 3 first round picks, teams would need to do a lot of juggling to be able to afford him

A team acquiring Brannstrom would make space for him if they don't already have that space. You can bury a player in the AHL, you can send a small contract to another team with an asset, there's also going to be more players on LTIR. We're not talking about huge amounts, there's ways to save cap space.