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Greg Wishynski
multiple authors
Some NHL teams told ESPN they are frustrated with the impact of the league’s accelerated salary cap rules ahead of Friday’s trade deadline.
The new collective bargaining agreement between the NHL and NHLPA, which was announced in July, begins on September 16. The league, however, pushed through some new rules governing the salary cap for the 2025-26 season and only informed its general managers about those changes last September.
An NHL team executive told ESPN, “Teams made plans and then, in September, the league changed the rules. It’s bush league.” “All of a sudden, if you’re one of the teams that plans a certain way, they’ve changed the rules for you.”
An NHL player agent said that the expedited rules should have been announced when the new CBA was finalized.
The agent told ESPN, “If the new rules were going to be implemented this season, everyone would have liked them to go into effect on July 1. Instead, they were announced right before the start of the regular season and it surprised a lot of people.”
NHL deputy commissioner Bill Daly told ESPN that the new CBA rules were explained to general managers last June.
“We have made clear that the timing of implementation is still an open issue. Certainly they knew or should have known that this was a possibility, and possibly also knew that we were going to push for early implementation,” Daly said via email on Tuesday.
Messages to the NHLPA were not returned.
The biggest rule change targeted playoff teams that built postseason lineups that exceeded the regular-season salary cap. For example, a team that places a high-salaried player on long-term injured reserve (LTIR) can use its open salary cap space to acquire new players. But if that injured player returns when the playoffs begin – something that has become common in the NHL for some franchises – then that team can have a lineup that can exceed the regular season salary cap without any impact.
To counter that trend, the new CBA created a de facto “playoff salary cap”, where teams must field a 20-player game-day lineup whose “average club salary” is under the “upper limit” of the regular season salary cap for that team.
“I wish there would have been a little more consultation on how the playoff salary cap would work,” an NHL general manager told ESPN. “It’s like, ‘These playoff rules are an issue we didn’t even know about, and now we have to worry about it all year.'”
Additionally, the LTIR rules were changed so that teams can only replace an injured player’s salary up to the previous season’s average league salary instead of his full salary cap hit. The only way to use the full salary cap space was to declare that injured player out for the regular season and the entire playoffs.
dallas stars just did it with the injured forward tyler seguin. They were using $3.82 million of Seguin’s $9.85 million in salary cap relief. After declaring them out for the season, they can now use the entire amount.
Finally, the new CBA limited trades on a player’s salary with “double retention”, in which two different teams retain a percentage of a player’s cap hit to facilitate that player’s ending up with a third team. The new rule requires 75 regular-season days between trades in which that player’s salary is retained, making them logically unfair at the deadline.
One general manager told ESPN that teams may not have realized the timing aspect of the double-retention rule, in which a team must acquire a salary-retaining player by December 2, 2025, in order to retain that player again at the trade deadline.
Another NHL general manager told ESPN, “There will be 2-3 trades that won’t happen because double-retention is not an option.” “But what it’s really going to do is even the playing field for the playoffs in a way that it hasn’t in recent years.”
Another factor at their trade deadline is the salary cap, which is set at $95.5 million this season and is projected to rise to at least $104 million next season. As the NHL saw in last summer’s free agent market, many teams are re-signing their pending free agents rather than making deadline-based decisions on their future.
“It’s not like this huge group of teams is just selling,” minnesota wild GM Bill Guerin said. “And yet, the way the cap is raised, teams can keep their players. They can sign who they have. And so we’ll just see what’s there.”
As time approaches Friday’s 3 p.m. ET deadline, there is some disagreement over how the rest of the week will unfold.
“It’s dead in there, man,” one general manager told ESPN. “You have some teams spending up to the limit and some teams spending close to the limit, but not everyone is spending close to the limit. So when their players are free agents, they have money in the system to re-sign them.”
However, one NHL player agent said he expected the week to be busy, but without many “earth-shaking deals”.
“I think we’re going to see a lot of deals involving players who make $1.5 million or less on expiring contracts,” the agent told ESPN.
Whatever the quantity, NHL team executives agree that the accelerated CBA rules have changed the landscape at this trade deadline.
“I think the CBA things are still coming up as we move forward, whether it’s cap counts for the playoffs or term limits or some of the things that are in place,” boston bruins GM Don Sweeney said. “Those are the things we have to attend to and live [with] And find out what they are going to do.
“We’ll know after the deadline whether the teams were handcuffed or not. I think moving forward, maybe it will loosen up. But I can’t make a prediction for 32 teams.”
