Can Stevie clean house?

Abdelkader, 0 goals $4.75 mil
Howard 2 wins, $4 mil
Nielsen 3 goals $5.5 mil

A lot of money for ZERO production.

Howard is an unrestricted free agent at season's end; that's an easy one. Ericsson and Daley finally come off the books too.

Nielsen has two more and Abby 3 more years left on their contracts after this season. No one is going to buy them.

Buying them out would mean we would still have to pay them 2/3 their remaining contracts over double the term. We're still paying Stephen Weiss $1.67 million a year through next year because of his buyout - and that money counts against the cap.

We're best off just letting them play bottom-six and PK minutes and ride out those contracts. They may not generate scoring, but they're still useful members of the team from a veteran leadership standpoint and can still kill penalties. We won't need to pay Zadina, Seider, Veleno, Choloski, Rasmussen, etc. until those contracts are off the books; so we'll be fine.

The good news is Yzerman will have about $28M in cap to work with this offseason. Mantha and Bertuzzi will need new contracts, but we'll still have plenty of money to left to possibly import some good free agent talent.

2020 NHL Free Agents Tracker