With the trade deadline approaching, cap and roster flexibility are still going to be important for the Habs, even with Brendan Gallagher’s LTIR placement. With that in mind, the team once again placed Paul Byron on waivers on Friday and he passed through unclaimed on Saturday.
This was the third time this season that he has been on the wire despite playing in all but one of Montreal’s 37 games this season. He has just four goals and eight assists on the year, hardly a great return on a $3.4M cap hit which is why they could comfortably run him through again without any concern that he’d be picked up.
The Canadiens could have waited another couple of days to do this as he had one more game of exemption before they needed to reset his clock. However, his 10-game/30-day clock has now been reset, giving them the ability to move him back and forth for a little while longer now.
While Montreal is in LTIR, there is still some benefit to trying to shuffle Byron back and forth. If they can get below the accruable cap space limit (which, per CapFriendly, is $81.39M) for a day, they can actually still bank some cap space. That will be tricky to do between now and the trade deadline if they have plans on adding someone but if they wind up standing pat, they should be able to save some room to throw against their performance bonuses and reduce the potential salary cap overage penalty for next season.