The Red Wings claim Christian Djoos off Waivers

Yesterday the Ducks placed Christian Djoos, along with Anthony Stolars, Andy Welinski, Andrew Poturalski, Chase De Leo, Vinni Lettieri, Sam Carrick, Andrew Agozzino, and David Backes, on waivers. These moves were not only done to get guys through waivers that will be spending most of the season with the Gulls but also to make these players eligible for the taxi squad.

As I broke down previously, the taxi squad will be important for a lot of NHL clubs this season, especially the Ducks to start the season. In order to fully maximize the LTIR relief from kesler’s contract, the Ducks need to be under the salary cap by opening night. The simplest way to put it is that the elevated cap ceiling for the Ducks will be whatever their cap hit is when they place Kesler on waivers plus Kesler’s cap hit. For instance, if the Ducks have an overall cap hit of $80 million at the time when they put Kesler on waivers, their elevated cap ceiling due to LTIR relief is $80 million + $6.875 million = $86.875 million. If they were directly at the cap ceiling of $81.5 million, then that elevated cap ceiling would be $81.5 million + $6.875 million = $88.375 million. So as you can see it benefits the Ducks to be as close to the salary cap ceiling as possible when they place Kesler on LTIR.

That leads to yesterday’s moves, in total those moves along with some guys that are waiver exempt being placed on the taxi squad or sent to the AHL, would get the Ducks underneath but close to the salary cap. The Ducks did run a massive risk by placing Christian Djoos on waivers. They were betting on the fact that a lot of teams in training camp are trying to figure out their rosters, so they do not necessarily want to claim a guy off waivers due to them having to keep that player on the roster. This risk by the Ducks did not pay off.

Christian Djoos was claimed by the Detroit Red Wings this morning, and the likelihood of them placing him on waivers again with the Ducks having the first right to claim him is low. Below is their current defense group per CapFriendly:

As you can see it is not exactly a stacked group and Djoos should slide into an elevated role on that team. Sorry Ducks fans, Djoos will not be seen in a Ducks sweater again.

So you might be wondering were there any alternatives to Djoos being placed on waivers. The first thing to mention is the Guhle injury negatively impacted this situation. When a player is injured, their cap hit remains, so the Ducks were stuck with Guhle’s $800k cap hit in this situation. If Guhle had not gotten hurt two days ago, there would have been a lot more ways to get cap compliant.

Having said that, there were still plenty of options at the Ducks disposal to be cap compliant, some that would have resulted in less LTIR relief and others that would have been more creative. For instance, by placing Larsson on waivers instead of Djoos, the Ducks would have had $200k less cap relief but they would have been able to keep the better player. They also could have placed guys like Sam Steel and Max Jones, who are making $863,333 towards the cap, on the taxi squad and kept guys like Chase De Leo and Sam Carrick, who are making $700k towards the cap. Then once Kesler is placed on LTIR, De Leo and Carrick can be sent down and Jones and Steel can be put back on the roster. At the end of the day, there were ways to get cap compliant without putting Djoos on waivers to get him on the taxi squad.

This was poor asset management by Murray and unnecessary risk that makes the team undoubtedly worse, even if Djoos was only going to be a third-pairing D man.