The Toronto Maple Leafs fiscal situation was looking rather dire.
By Tuesday afternoon, the club had only about $4,500 left under the NHL's $71.4-million salary cap, the equivalent of one day's pay for a player making around $860,000.
But they had a solution.
The Leafs shuffled around two prospects, sending down Byron Froese and recalling Casey Bailey from the AHL.
Then on Wednesday, they did the reverse, recalling Froese and demoting Bailey, who didn't even practice with the team.
By then, they had more than $5-million in cap space – more than 16 other teams.
The NHL's cap works in byzantine ways, especially when it comes to long-term injured reserve. The Leafs have run into a bit of injury trouble of late, too, with Tyler Bozak, Jake Gardiner and now Nick Spaling missing games, which means players like Froese have had to be brought up, which taxes the cap.
Add in big salaries for Nathan Horton (who is essentially retired with an awful back injury) and Stephane Robidas (who is in limbo with an uncertain injury situation) and all told the Leafs had nearly $15-million (more than 20 per cent) of its cap dedicated to injured players when they played Arizona on Monday.
Bozak and Gardiner are expected back this weekend. Spaling's injury isn't considered serious either. But the Leafs were able to create all that cap space by putting Horton on LTIR. And the cap dance with Froese and Bailey was part of that.
That's because the closer a team is to being capped out before using LTIR, the more they can exceed the cap by. So the Leafs pushed theirs to the absolute max.
One day of having Bailey's bigger contract on the cap instead of Froese pushed them $1,881 closer to the max, which in turn bought them that much more space.
The good news for Bailey is he got one day's NHL pay ($4,973.12) for the non-trouble, a huge sum for an AHL rookie making only $70,000 to play with the Toronto Marlies.
Froese? He lost some money – about $2,500 – but now he's back in the NHL, where he's already impressed coach Mike Babcock in his first two NHL games and could be staying for a while.
And Winkler, Man., which has been watching hometown hero Froese with interest this week, rejoiced.
This is such a silly cap loophole that you wonder if the NHL will move to close it in the next collective bargaining agreement. Perhaps they make it mandatory that a player at least skates with the NHL team if they're "called up"?
In any event, the Leafs now have plenty of cap space – and the option to put Robidas's $3-million on LTIR should they somehow spend their way through Horton's contract.
The cap, in other words, won't be a problem for Toronto again this season.
And it never really was – beyond looking tight on paper.