Dallas Stars general manager Jim Nill explained why his team had to trade young and talented winger Mavrik Bourque away.
On July 1, Bourque was sent to the Nashville Predators, alongside defenseman Ilya Lyubushkin, for a second-round pick and a third-round pick.
It’s not much value for a 24-year-old center who is coming off a 20-goal, 41-point season, but due to the realities of the NHL salary cap and the very real threat of an offer sheet, Nill was forced to give him up.
Jim Nill Explains Mavrik Bourque Trade
Speaking to reporters after the Bourque trade, Nill explained why he made the move with Nashville.
“That was tough. We love Mavrik. Good player for us, his game’s really come on. MVP in the American League. Got his game better and better. A good young player for us,” Nill said.
“Unfortunately, he’s a casualty of the cap world. You have to be cap compliant, and there’s decisions that have to be made.
“He did a good job. His contract was coming up. He bet on himself last year, and where his contract was going, it was something we wouldn’t have been able to fit in. You can’t fit everybody in. It’s just part of business.”
Stars in a Cap Crunch
The Stars are one of the NHL’s teams that is feeling the cap crunch the most right now, despite the NHL salary cap rising to $104 million for next season.
The team currently has $10.6 million in cap space, but that’s without top-line winger Jason Robertson signed. If the Stars sign Robertson, then all of that cap room goes away.
That’s why every dollar is important to Nill, and why he traded away Bourque, who the team loved but simply couldn’t afford to keep. Plus, the team got rid of Lyubushkin’s $3.25 million cap hit in the deal, which also helped them.
Taking a look at the Stars’ cap right now, one name that sticks out like a sore thumb is Tyler Seguin, who is due $9.85 million in the final season of his contract. The Stars would love to move off that final season of his deal, but they would have to pay another team assets to take him, and that doesn’t seem likely at this time.
The Stars are going to have to ride out the final year of Seguin’s deal, and then next year they will have a ton of cap space opened up, whether that’s given to Robertson if the team can re-sign him, or they can play around on the free-agent market.
Otherwise, Dallas doesn’t really have any bad contracts, so it will be interesting to see how Nill can fit Robertson into the team’s cap next year if he stays. As the Stars’ GM said, you simply can’t afford to have every good player you want to keep when there is a hard salary cap, so he has to make some tough decisions, and unfortunately for Stars fans, Bourque was one of the players who had to be traded.
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