Habs Place Two Players on LTIR

As part of their early-season roster shuffling for salary cap optimization, the Habs have placed Rafael Harvey-Pinard and Patrik Laine on long-term injured reserve (LTIR).

The first of those placements came on Monday when the Canadiens submitted their season-opening roster.  That involved both Arber Xhekaj and Jayden Struble being papered to Laval while Harvey-Pinard landed on LTIR (I believe offseason LTIR was the designation here); he’s out for at least six weeks with a leg injury.  According to PuckPedia, that sequence got Montreal around $83,000 shy of the perfect LTIR placement.  All things considered, not a bad outcome.

Notably, that money wasn’t anywhere near enough to bring either Xhekaj or Struble back, let alone both.  To do so, they needed to put another player on LTIR, that being Patrik Laine, who will miss at least the next two months with his knee injury.

Montreal could have placed Carey Price on LTIR once again and that will probably be the eventual outcome.  However, if the Canadiens wind up making some cost-cutting moves and dip out of LTIR altogether (of which they have to go below $88 million plus cut the additional $83,000), then it would give them a chance to exit it outright when Laine returns and bank space for just being under the $88M cap.

But if Price went on there now, they’d be locked in at needing to free up the extra $83,000 to get out of LTIR.  It’s basically small semantics that probably won’t matter in the end but delaying his placement was the correct move.

Wrapping up the season-opening roster news, both David Reinbacher and Jacob Perreault received non-roster injury designations.  The NHL rescinded Perreault’s demotion last month due to the injury, meaning he’ll technically land on Montreal’s injured reserve for now.  Neither player was on an NHL roster at any point last season so there is no cap effect for either one.

In other news Tuesday, the team revealed that Jayden Struble will not be able to play in Wednesday’s season opener against Toronto due to a minor injury.  He didn’t skate on Monday and left Tuesday’s skate early.  The Habs have the maximum of 23 healthy players on their roster at the moment and would need to move Struble to IR if they want to bring up an extra blueliner.  If they do that, Montreal could back-date that placement to October 2nd (the day after his last preseason game) which would mean he could be activated at any time after Wednesday.