One would think that life is easy these days for an NHL capologist.

The league’s salary cap jumped more than ever in the offseason, from $88 million to $95.5 million. More big increases are set to come as it skyrockets up to at least $113.5 million by 2027.

Entering this season, for the first time since the cap was introduced 20 years ago, more than half of the NHL has at least $4 million in breathing room and only a handful of teams are right at the limit, ostensibly making front office executives’ lives that much simpler.

The only problem? There’s a new wrinkle this season — the playoff salary cap.

The postseason, beginning in mid-April, may seem far away, but with the way the NHL’s new playoff cap calculation works, teams will need to keep track of two cap counts simultaneously throughout the year. One will be done the old way, with a set amount of salary for every day a player is on the roster throughout the regular season. The other will be the new playoff cap, which simply mandates that the cap hit of the 20 players on the roster for a postseason game is under $95.5 million.

What the NHL is trying to do is avoid a situation like in last season, when the Florida Panthers entered the deciding game of the Stanley Cup Final with a roster that was $5 million over the salary cap and nearly $13 million more than that of their opponent, the Edmonton Oilers.

But after talking to team executives and others around the league the past few days, it’s clear the new system may have some unintended consequences.

We calculated the new Playoff Cap Hit for the rosters that played in the final 2025 Cup Final Game:#LetsGoOilers Playoff Cap Hit was $80.6M vs $88M Cap#TimetoHunt Playoff Cap Hit was $93.0M vs $88M Cap

See full calculations & details on Playoff Cap:https://t.co/VAFVnwesZq

— PuckPedia (@PuckPedia) July 11, 2025

In the past, teams like the 2015 Chicago Blackhawks, the 2021 Tampa Bay Lightning, the 2023 Vegas Golden Knights and last year’s Panthers all won the Cup with rosters over the cap by using long-term injured reserve to stash a star player’s salary during the season.

While that loophole will no longer be available under the new system, I’ve come up with four others that we may see exploited in the playoffs by teams looking for an extra edge.

1. Disappearing the backup goalie

The new CBA’s “Playoff Cap Counting” rules state that teams “must list 18 skaters and two goaltenders on its playing roster for each playoff game.” What they do not stipulate is which players those have to be.

For example, a team with two goaltenders making a lot of money could now dress a cheaper backup in a playoff game and free up that excess salary to be allocated to other players.

The Vancouver Canucks have starter Thatcher Demko on a $5 million cap hit and backup Kevin Lankinen at $4.5 million this season. If they were willing to use third-stringer Jiri Patera, who makes a league-minimum $775,000, as the bench-door opener in the playoffs, it would free up $3.725 million or $4.225 million depending on which starter they played.

It’s debatable whether having a much cheaper, less experienced backup would cost a team games. Second goaltenders are rarely used in playoff games, and when they are deployed, it’s often in a cause that’s already lost.

In the past, without a playoff cap, teams could simply play as expensive a goalie tandem as they wanted. Now they will have to calculate if the money they are using on their backup would be better used on a trade-deadline addition at forward or defense instead.

And if they’re willing to roll the dice on having their No. 3 on the bench — and their backup in the press box.

2. Parking the overpaid veteran

One new maneuver that may be more common than an unorthodox goalie swap: simply sitting a player deemed to be making too much money. Teams could take a long hard look at their rosters before the trade deadline, determine that an underperformer down the lineup won’t be on their playoff roster, and then spend that money elsewhere.

One team I could see this making sense for this season would be the New Jersey Devils. Once they have RFA defenseman Luke Hughes signed, the Devils are likely to be at the cap all season, and they have aging winger Ondrej Palat on a $6 million cap hit.

Palat will be 35 years old by the postseason and had only 28 points last season. His value is down to only $1.5 million by our projections, meaning that putting him in the playoff lineup leaves a lot of value on the table. The Devils could theoretically add a $6 million player using salary retention and cap space accrued throughout the regular season and then bench Palat in the playoffs in order to get under the postseason cap.

New Jersey is in a unique situation on defense, too, as they have two young players on entry-level contracts (Simon Nemec and Seamus Casey) who could be played instead of a veteran making $4 million or more, opening up more cap room that way.

They could also take a hybrid approach and sit either Palat or a high-paid defensemen depending on what the situation called for in a playoff series.

Either way, this loophole would mean teams would be putting millions of dollars up in the press box for cap reasons on a night-to-night basis, as opposed to simply dressing their best lineup talent-wise.

“Players were all for this (new playoff salary cap) in the new CBA, but they’re going to be livid,” one executive said of the fact that players with larger salaries could end up being sat in playoff games so teams can get under the cap.

3. Paying for insurance

This option is probably less of a loophole and more of a luxury for bigger-market teams that don’t mind spending extra money.

These general managers could opt to add players, even if they put the clubs over the playoff cap, simply as a means of adding injury insurance. Acquiring an extra $3 million winger and/or $2 million defenseman right before the trade deadline — when only a quarter of their salary will count against the regular season cap — may make a lot of sense as a reserve option for a top team.

The Oilers ran into this issue last year when key defenseman Mattias Ekholm went down with a serious injury a few weeks after the trade deadline, meaning they weren’t able to replace him at the time. Ekholm ended up missing all but seven games of Edmonton’s Cup run, leaving them with $6 million in value out of the lineup a lot of the time.

In the new order, they could potentially add proactive injury insurance and then have more options when the playoffs started, even if they theoretically wouldn’t be able to play their new additions with a fully heathy roster.

Again, under this example, the playoff cap likely means more salary in the press box overall. That’s because, unlike during the regular season when every player on the 23-man roster counts against the cap, only 20 players will be part of the calculation in the playoffs, no matter what.

And because there’s no roster limit in the postseason, a big-budgeted team could fill its press box with talent as long as they can squeeze them under the cap for the final quarter of the regular season.

4. Betting big on bonuses

One other line in the new CBA’s explanation of the playoff salary cap immediately stands out:

“The amount included for a player with performance bonuses and/or games played bonuses shall be the sum of the player’s Paragraph 1 NHL salary, signing, roster and reporting bonuses only (i.e. performance and/or games played bonuses shall not be included).”

Paragraph 1 salary is a player’s base salary, and signing bonuses are money that’s given up front (usually on July 1) in most star players’ contracts. But older players on one-year deals and young players on entry-level deals are eligible for performance bonuses that essentially will not exist under the playoff cap.

Jonathan Toews’ contract with the Winnipeg Jets could be a big beneficiary of this rule, as he has just a $2 million base salary but $5 million in additional potential bonuses. While many of those are targets he can hit during the playoffs — e.g. $250,000 bonuses for the Jets winning each of the first three rounds and a $1 million bonus if they win the Cup — that money will either be counted against the regular season cap or, if that is exceeded, carried over to the next season.

As far as the playoff cap is concerned, Toews is just a $2 million player in the postseason, no questions asked.

This season, seven other veteran players have performance or games-played bonuses of $1.5 million or more in their contracts: the Kings’ Corey Perry, the Avalanche’s Brent Burns, the Senators’ Claude Giroux, the Red Wings’ Patrick Kane, the Stars’ Jamie Benn, the Devils’ Evgenii Dadonov and the Penguins’ Anthony Mantha.

Elite young players on entry-level contracts, meanwhile, will cost their teams a maximum of only $975,000 under the playoff cap. This includes burgeoning stars like Chicago’s Connor Bedard, Anaheim’s Leo Carlsson, Montreal’s Ivan Demidov and Carolina’s Alexander Nikishin, among others.

There are limitations to performance bonus-laden deals for veterans, as they’re only for one-year contracts and typically for older players or those coming off serious injuries, but expect this contract type to proliferate with their added playoff value.

It’ll be fascinating to see how the first postseason under a salary cap unfolds next spring, and whether any of these loopholes (or any unforeseen ones) lead to changes down the line.

The league’s new CBA includes a provision where the NHL and NHLPA “will meet and confer after the first playoffs for which these rules are in effect to discuss and seek any concerns with their operation.” There will also be an opportunity after the second playoffs with these rules for either party to “reopen these provisions for potential modification.”

After digging into some of these potential loopholes, I expect there will need to be some additional refining. Having differently calculated hard salary caps for the regular season and playoffs is a new frontier for pro sports, and NHL GMs have a way of finding advantages that can “break” the cap when given enough time and resources to do so.

We’ve certainly seen it before.

(Photo of Canucks goalies Kevin Lankinen and Thatcher Demko: Alexis R. Knight / NHLI via Getty Images)