Wading into the saving players debate I'd have to say that I would probably be inclined to save allstar players and above during the early part of the season, but as the season progressed only concern myself with the players with higher potential. Its my belief that allstar players would probably only make the U21 team if they were single position trained right from the beginning of their rookie season.
In terms of a salary cutoff I'd probably only be interested in the higher end of the scale with a cutoff of around $4.5k maybe. I think that we'd really want to be saving the very best players to be developed for the U21 and NT. Saving slightly better than average players probably doesn't really do a lot for the Canadian national team setup.