Just as the Toronto Maple Leafs appeared to be getting healthy, another injury has occurred. The team has placed Andreas Johnsson on long-term injured reserve after sustaining a leg injury on Wednesday night. Johnsson will be re-evaluated after the Christmas break, but for now the Maple Leafs have recalled Nic Petan, Martin Marincin and Pontus Aberg from the minor leagues.
Johnsson’s injury actually relieves some of the salary cap pressure for the Maple Leafs, who were set to move forward with just 21 players on the roster for the time being. Now that they can move Johnsson’s $3.4MM cap hit onto long-term injured reserve and replace him with several players from the minor leagues.
Aberg is the most interesting name in the group, if only because he hadn’t gotten a chance with the Maple Leafs prior to this recall. The 37th overall pick in 2012, he has bounced around from Nashville to Edmonton to Anaheim to Minnesota before arriving in Toronto, never spending a full season in the NHL. Through 22 games in the AHL this season, Aberg has 24 points to lead the Marlies and very well could get an opportunity alongside some of Toronto’s best players.
It takes three players to replace him?
Petan, Marincin and Aberg all add up to less than Johnsson, cap-wise, so their roster can look more full than it otherwise might. At the rate they were going with their cap strutcture, I was almost hoping Kyle was going to go ECHL-style this year and simply cut the roster down to three lines. That may work in video games, but not so much in real NHL life.
“strutcture”??? Wonder why that wasn’t caught by the spell checker? STRUCTURE. Used in a sentence: Structure is NOT spelled s-t-r-u-t-c-t-u-r-e! Now, back to the game with Bonesy & Ralphie!