Avalanche Stash Josh Manson on LTIR, Unlocking $3.9 Million in Phantom Cap Space

The Colorado Avalanche just placed Josh Manson on Long-Term Injured Reserve, which sounds like a tragedy until you realize it just handed the front office a shiny new $3.95 million credit card.

By shifting Manson and his upper-body injury off the active roster, Colorado instantly opened up cap space. According to PuckPedia, they immediately used a fraction of it to call up defenseman Alex Gagne, leaving them with a cool $3.9 million in LTIR relief to play with.

"PuckPedia reported the LTIR placement and the resulting $3.9M in remaining cap space after the Gagne call-up."

Manson has been a physical presence on the blue line, but the production has been rough. He was sitting on just one goal and five assists with a minus-10 rating before crashing into the boards against the Dallas Stars. Now, his $3.95 million average annual value is off the books for the foreseeable future.

The Avalanche training room is starting to look like a triage center. With Gabriel Landeskog, Jonathan Drouin, Ross Colton, and Miles Wood already banged up, adding Manson to the pile is objectively hilarious in a dark, twisted way. At this rate, the equipment manager is going to have to lace up just to field a full roster.

For anyone looking at the futures market or nightly puck lines, this is the kind of roster chaos that makes betting on Colorado a total coin flip. They just blanked the Detroit Red Wings 4-0 but also gave up seven goals to the Columbus Blue Jackets a few days prior. You never know which version of the defense is going to show up.

The Avs head to Toronto to face the Toronto Maple Leafs next. We will see if Gagne can eat some of those missing defensive minutes, or if that $3.9 million in phantom cap space gets weaponized before the trade deadline to stop the bleeding.