Golden Knights place injured winger on LTIR, get much-needed cap relief

After adding several players in trades leading up to the trade deadline, the Golden Knights needed some more salary-cap space.  To create that room in the short term, CapFriendly reports that they’ve placed winger William Carrier and his $1.4M AAV on LTIR.  They’ve used some of that space immediately as they’ve recalled winger Brendan Brisson from AHL Henderson, per the AHL’s transactions log.

The 29-year-old has missed the last two months with an upper-body injury that he underwent surgery for back in January.  At the time he was given a designation of week-to-week, so it appears that recovery from the injury has gone slower than anticipated.  He joins Mark Stone and Robin Lehner as players currently on LTIR; newly acquired center Tomas Hertl is out long-term term but is not on LTIR at the moment.

Carrier is a pending unrestricted free agent and missing this much time due to injury certainly isn’t going to help things if he makes it to the open market in July.  Before getting hurt, Carrier had five goals and two assists along with 71 hits in 33 games while averaging 11:16 per night, his lowest ATOI since the 2020-21 campaign.

As for Brisson, it’s his sixth recall of the season and he has played well in limited action with the big club.  Through 12 appearances so far, the 22-year-old has two goals and four assists while averaging 12:39 a night.  He also has 13 goals and 15 assists in 42 games with the Silver Knights.  With Vegas only having 11 healthy forwards on the active roster before his promotion, they should be able to classify this as an emergency recall, one that wouldn’t count against their post-deadline limit of four.