UPDATE:

NOTE: now according to Cap Friendly, Liljegren’s AAV and bonuses have been subtracted from the LTIR pools. LTIR comes in two flavours, one pool is for performance bonuses and one for the salary portion of the total AAV.

This means there is now $400,000 in the bonuses pool and $88,333 in the salary pool available with Nic Petan on the roster. That would indicate that there is room to recall Liljegren in the future.

My understanding is that while you can use the salary pool to cover bonuses if the bonus pool runs short, you can’t do the reverse, so this seems to put the maximum AAV of any call-up without bonuses at the previously assumed $863,333.

But having Liljegren on the roster out of camp, somehow, in ways I don’t grasp, created that bonus pool when he was sent down. It’s worth noting that Teemu Kivihalme has $132,000 in  performance bonuses on a cap hit of $792,500, and he is now a player that could be called up in place of many of the depth players currently on the roster.

The training camp calculation of LTIR is a complex thing, and I’m willing to defer to the experts on this one, and take Cap Friendly’s numbers as correct.

Timothy Liljegren was surprisingly on the Maple Leafs active roster for game one of the regular season. The reason, as suspected, was mostly to set the salary cap used by the 23 healthy players as close to the max as possible.

The Leafs could have moved Liljegren before the game on Wednesday, but he got to see the opening ceremonies and the game from the press box. It’s not a bad idea to make the prospect who is taking an obvious second place to Rasmus Sandin see himself as still part of the team.

The Leafs are set up right now to use 100% of their allowed LTIR pool (that’s just how it works when you come out of training camp on LTIR). That pool will have $863,333 in space once Liljegren is sent down, and the bonuses on Liljegren’s contract were not counted in that pool, so that is the total free space.

If the Leafs want to call up a player, assuming Travis Dermott isn’t magically healed, they have a lot to choose from. All eight players the Leafs have recently put through waivers can fit in that space — Nic Petan, Kenny Agostino, Garett Wilson, Pontus Aberg, Tyler Gaudet, Ben Harpur, Jordan Schmaltz or Kevin Gravel.

Teemu Kivihalme has too much in bonuses that would be added to his smaller cap hit, giving him an AAV of $925,00, so he can’t re recalled. Egor Korshkov, the only other late cut, will not fit either with his max ELC of $925,000. Dermott’s cap hit is exactly the same as Liljegren’s.

The Leafs play on the road in Columbus on Friday. Meanwhile, the Marlies begin play on Saturday night at home in Toronto.

Further intrigue:

Cap Space Shuffle