BAIL'ING OUT
Isles' poised to cut ties with veteran after 15-year tenure
As the rest of the league focuses on their newest players, the Islanders’ eyes will be on their longest-tenured.
Without a first-round pick and with the NHL’s first buyout period ending on Friday, the focus for general manager Lou Lamoriello during Wednesday’s first round should be doing everything possible to find a trade that sends Josh Bailey elsewhere, allowing the Islanders to go into free agency with his $5 million contract off the books entirely.
By both actions and words, Lamoriello has committed to the idea of running it back next season with a group that got across the playoff cutline on the last day before exiting in the first round against the Hurricanes. To do that — or for that matter, to do much of anything else — Bailey is a necessary casualty.
The 33-year-old winger, who debuted in 2008, is the longesttenured player for any New York team but both he and Lamoriello have acknowledged the end is near for his time on Long Island. After a lackluster regular season, Bailey was made a healthy scratch for all six games of the playoffs before saying on breakup day that, “If I’m gonna be sitting in the stands a lot, that’s not something I want to do.”
It is not so much a question as to whether Bailey will be on the roster next season, but as to how the Islanders will go about moving him.
A trade without any retained salary would be the ideal for a team that is currently set to have just $5.33 million in available cap space when free agency hits Saturday, with stated plans to try and re-sign four unrestricted free agents in Zach Parise, Pierre Engvall, Scott Mayfield and Semyon Varlamov, along with restricted free agent Oliver Wahlstrom. Such gymnastics would not be easy with Bailey entirely off the books — they are next to impossible with his cap hit on it.
The obvious landing spots are fairly limited, with Anaheim and Chicago standing out after Craig Morgan, a well-connected beat writer in Arizona, suggested a lack of interest on the Coyotes’ part. Creating an additional layer of complication is that the Islanders would likely need to add a sweetener in any deal, and are already without first- and third-round picks in this draft.
The Isles are also without their third-round pick in next year’s draft, which went to Toronto for Engvall, and the depth of their farm system has suffered from not having a first-round pick since Simon Holmstrom in 2019. Even so, the need to clear space likely trumps that of making all five of the picks the Islanders hold in this draft, if it comes to that.
If the Islanders can’t make a trade happen, the obvious move would be buying out Bailey on Friday, letting the team save $2.33 million in cap dollars this season while taking an additional $1.16 million hit in 2024-25, when the flat cap era is scheduled to end. (The onbrand move for Lamoriello would, of course, be to announce nothing while the Islanders’ set of free agents remain conspicuously unsigned until whenever he can find a deal to his liking.)
Given how adept Lamoriello is at secrecy, there is always the possibility for an out-of-nowhere move, as he pulled off at the draft a year ago by trading for Alexander Romanov, then again in January with the Bo Horvat deal. But after how vocal he has been about believing in the group he has, and with how limited the Islanders are in cap space and draft picks, it is hard to see such a move in the cards.
Of course, that may just be a failure of imagination.