Yesterday, the Maple Leafs officially put Jake Muzzin on LTIR, settling the question on whether he’ll be out for only a short while or for much longer. The Leafs obviously can’t say for certain that he’ll be out just long enough for the playoffs to start (or risk angering Gary), but indications are they’re going to make the most of the LTIR pool money they now have. Muzzin will be out pretty much to the end of the season. And any significant deadline adds will then confirm that he won’t be able to return during the reason season.

Speaking of that pool money, the Leafs got as close as they possibly could to the salary cap ceiling yesterday before placing Muzzin on LTIR. This is because the LTIR space you get is the cap hit of the player that’s on LTIR minus the cap space the team had the day they put him on. So leaving a million in cap space means a million off the $5.625 million the Leafs would ideally have to spend. The Leafs were able to get that loss number down below $1k, which is very impressive according to CapFriendly, so they’ll have pretty much all of Muzzin’s cap hit to go get some help at the deadline.

I know there’s two numbers (10k vs 1k) being talked about here. CapFriendly accounts for the daily cap hits the Leafs have been working with and they’re the most accurate as a result.

While cap space is always a good thing, this injury to Muzzin is not good no matter how you slice it. Hopefully he can recover fully and come back to play at a high level, or at the very least not have to suffer long term effects of CTE.

As for the roster heading into tonight’s game against the Wild, don’t expect Rubīns or Menell to be sticking around very long — they were just here to get close to the cap ceiling — and there’s no reason not to expect Rasmus Sandin in the lineup. One thing to watch out for is who is going to be the odd one out on the right side; Liljegren, Lyubushkin, or Justin Holl.

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The soap opera run of the Edmonton Oilers might someday outlast The Young and the Restless.

First off, it’s a bit much to call Forsberg a superstar. Second of all, I don’t care what you call him, gimme! the Predators are fourth in the Central Division right now and are probably going to lose the pending UFA after getting demolished by Colorado in the first round. Probably.

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