When the Stanley Cup playoffs begin on Saturday, for the first time ever, teams will have to dress lineups that come in under the salary-cap ceiling.
It’s one of the many rule changes outlined in the memorandum of understanding between the NHL and the NHL Players’ Association, which was agreed upon in June. The rule was implemented to prevent teams from stashing players on long-term injured reserve in the regular season and then dressing them in the playoffs.
Under the new rule, a team’s total roster can still exceed the salary cap of $95.5 million, but the 20-player active roster submitted for each game cannot.
The league created an app for teams to submit their playoff lineups, which was unveiled to the general managers at their annual meetings in Florida last month.
“We have an app and a function, and it’ll be submitted like rosters are for each playoff game at the time rosters are submitted for the playoff game,” NHL deputy commissioner Bill Daly told The Athletic’s Pierre LeBrun. “It will indicate to the general manager or whoever is submitting the roster when there’s an overage (over the cap) or a concern. They probably will know that going in. But it won’t allow them essentially to submit a roster that would be otherwise violating the provisions of the collective agreement.’’
A year ago, Matthew Tkachuk missed the final two months of the regular season but returned for the playoffs, and the “over-the-cap” Florida Panthers won the Stanley Cup. Concerns about cap circumvention — even if the team technically wasn’t “over the cap” in the playoffs — go back to the Chicago Blackhawks in 2015 with Patrick Kane, and also include the Tampa Bay Lightning with Nikita Kucherov in 2021 and the Vegas Golden Knights with Mark Stone in 2023.
Now, teams will submit a roster with 18 skaters and two goaltenders before every game, and it must be within the restraints of the cap. While this rule is new, it isn’t expected to be an issue during this postseason. Daly said last month that none of the playoff teams are in danger of icing a roster over the cap.
That’s largely due to another rule change, one involving how much cap relief a team gets from placing a player on long-term injured reserve. In previous years, teams would get full relief from a player’s cap hit, allowing them to replace it with more players ahead of the trade deadline. Under the new rule, teams only get relief equal to the amount of the previous season’s average league salary, which was approximately $3.8 million for this season.
If a player is declared out for the entirety of the postseason, teams can get full relief from that player’s cap hit, but that player is then ineligible to return. In reaction to these new rules, teams didn’t add and put their rosters over the cap limit ahead of this year’s deadline. As a result, there aren’t expected to be any cap-related lineup decisions this postseason.