Last month was busy on the buyout front. Cam Atkinson, Adam Boqvist, Jack Campbell, Nate Schmidt, Jeff Skinner and Ryan Suter were all cut loose from their former teams and became UFAs and have since landed deals for this season.
Few would have been surprised to see Red Wings defenseman Justin Holl added to that list. Holl, 32, landed a three-year, $10.2MM contract with the Wings in free agency last summer after operating as a serviceable top-four option for the Maple Leafs for the previous four seasons.
But Red Wings head coach Derek Lalonde didn’t even utilize him as an NHL regular last season, let alone one worth a $3.4MM cap hit. Holl stayed mostly healthy but was scratched for over half of the campaign, limited to 38 appearances. In those games, he recorded five assists, a +8 rating and 22 PIMs while averaging 15:05, his lowest since an 11-game stint in Toronto in 2018-19.
Detroit entered the summer with ample cap space, but most expected general manager Steve Yzerman to use whatever he had available. New deals are still needed for cornerstone RFAs Lucas Raymond and Moritz Seider, while the Wings were also expected to be one of the most active players on the UFA market to propel them to end their eight-year playoff drought in 2025.
That didn’t really happen. Their highest-profile addition to the roster was two-time Stanley Cup champion winger Vladimir Tarasenko, who’s really just a direct replacement for David Perron, who left for the Senators in free agency. They did manage to retain Patrick Kane on a one-year, $6.5MM deal and swapped James Reimer for Cam Talbot between the pipes on the open market, but they also dealt top-pair defenseman Jake Walman to the Sharks in a cap-dump move. As it stands, you could argue that their roster has taken a step back from last year’s club that lost out on the second wild-card spot in the East thanks to a tiebreaker with the Capitals.
To that end, some were puzzled when Yzerman opted to attach a second-round pick to get rid of Walman, who was quite effective in his role alongside Seider at even strength for the last two seasons, instead of upping their cap space by simply buying out Holl. But with two years remaining on Holl’s contract, a buyout would have translated to a dead cap hit of $1.13MM for the next four seasons. That’s likely something they didn’t want to be on the hook for as they inch toward contention, The Athletic’s Max Bultman writes.
Still, Lalonde was warranted in his limited usage of Holl. Despite giving him more advantageous usage than he faced in Toronto, Holl returned the favor with the worst possession quality results of his career, controlling just 42.6% of expected goals. He’d been over 50% in all of his four seasons as a regular with the Leafs.
With Walman out of the picture and more pressure on youngsters like Simon Edvinsson to take on minutes this season, though, Holl could find himself relied upon a bit more as an insurance policy. Bultman “doesn’t get the sense from Yzerman that he thinks Holl is a lost cause,” at least for now. After all, he did ink him to a multi-season, eight-figure contract just 12 months ago.
But a repeat of last year’s performance would likely lead Detroit more aggressively explore a buyout the final season of Holl’s contract when the window opens next June, says Bultman. It would still result in a $1.13MM dead cap charge, per PuckPedia, but only for the following two seasons. Holl would come off the books on July 1, 2027, only one year after his contract was due to expire.
Doing so would open up over $2MM for the Wings to drop in free agency in 2025. They’ll have their entire core locked up long-term after the Raymond and Seider deals eventually come across the finish line this summer. No true core players are up for new deals in 2025, and they’ll also have goalie Ville Husso’s albatross $4.75MM cap hit and $5.34MM worth of Olli Määttä and Jeff Petry coming off the books.