The final day of the first buyout window has claimed a second casualty as Sportsnet’s Elliotte Friedman reports (Twitter link) that the Wild have placed forward Tyler Ennis on unconditional waivers to buy out the final year of his contract. He had one year remaining on his deal with a $4.6MM cap hit. That means Minnesota will instead carry a cap hit of $2.167MM in 2018-19 and $1.217MM in 2019-20.
The Wild acquired the 28-year-old last offseason from the Sabres as part of the trade that saw defenseman Marco Scandella and winger Jason Pominville head to Buffalo with winger Marcus Foligno also heading to Minnesota.
While they were certainly hoping that a change of scenery would get him going, that didn’t wind up happening. While he did improve on his numbers with Buffalo, Ennis still posted just 22 points (8-14-22) in 73 games, hardly the type of production that justifies the type of contract he had.
New GM Paul Fenton had made it clear that they were looking to get out of the final year of his contract as he had been trying to attach Ennis in trade talks regarding wingers Charlie Coyle, Jason Zucker, and Nino Niederreiter. However, since they weren’t able to find a taker, they’ll now go down this path and free up nearly $2.2MM in additional cap space to work with this offseason.
didn’t the lakers just waive tyler ennis? two guys with the same name? is this the same guy? what planet are we on?
I thought the same thing, bad week for Tyler Ennis.
I would have rather see the Pens take a chance on him picking it up rather than Johnson.