The NHL's New Playoff Cap, Explained: The Loophole Three Cup Runs Built

Run the math on the Florida Panthers' lineup for Game 6 of last year's Stanley Cup Final, using the accounting rules that arrive this postseason for the first time, and the champions were $5,038,282 over the cap. The Edmonton Oilers, the team they beat, were $7,353,277 under it.

Neither number was real at the time — there was no playoff salary cap in 2025. There is now, and the gap between those two figures is close to the entire reason it exists.

The mechanism: no cap, so no consequence

Since the NHL introduced Long-Term Injured Reserve in the 2005 collective bargaining agreement, teams have been allowed to exceed the regular-season salary cap ceiling while replacing an injured player, then activate that player once he's healthy. For two decades, that trade-off was contained by one hard rule: the space had to close back up eventually, because the cap still applied.

The postseason broke that logic. There has never been a salary cap in the Stanley Cup Playoffs. A team could carry a full LTIR allotment all regular season, use the extra room to add rental players at the trade deadline, and then activate its injured star for Game 1 — fielding, in effect, two rosters' worth of salary at once, with no ceiling to answer to once the games actually mattered most.

It first drew real scrutiny in 2015, when Chicago's Patrick Kane broke his collarbone, missed the final 21 games of the season, and let the Blackhawks use his LTIR space to add Antoine Vermette before returning, injury-free, for Game 1 of the playoffs. Since then the pattern has repeated at the top of the sport: Tampa Bay with Nikita Kucherov in the Lightning's 2020-21 title run, Vegas with Mark Stone in 2022-23, and Florida with Matthew Tkachuk — and, this past spring, a discounted Brad Marchand — on the way to back-to-back finals appearances.

Figures are Puckpedia's retroactive application of the new accounting rules to the actual Game 6 rosters of the 2025 Stanley Cup Final — they show what each team's cap position would have been had this postseason's rules already been in effect.

Post by @frank_seravalli

What actually changes this spring

Two fixes arrive together, expedited into this season rather than waiting for the full CBA to take effect in September. First, every playoff game now requires a submitted 18-skater, two-goaltender roster whose average salary must fit under that season's cap ceiling — teams file it by 3 p.m. local time, or five hours before puck drop, whichever comes first. Dead cap space, buried contracts and retained salary all still count. A player can sit on a $130 million total roster all he wants; the 20 men dressed for a given game cannot.

Second, the regular-season LTIR relief itself got a ceiling. A team can still open cap space equal to an injured player's hit, but if that player is expected to return during the season or the playoffs, the relief is now capped at the prior season's average league salary — $3,817,293 for 2024-25. Exceed that hit, and the extra room simply isn't there anymore, unless the team formally declares the player out for the rest of the season and the postseason both, in which case it gets full relief but forfeits any chance of having him back.

"I think overall it's a good thing because it's a competitive advantage. I mean, that's how most people view it, especially if you're able to use it in the proper way. You never want to see injuries and you never want to see guys get hurt, but the fact of the matter is [teams] could take advantage of that. And with the new CBA, I think we've kind of tightened the rules up a little bit to make it a little more difficult."

Nazem Kadri, Calgary Flames center, to ESPN

One NHL player agent put the new arithmetic to ESPN more bluntly: "You can have $130 million in salaries on your total roster once the playoffs start, but the 18 players and two goalies that are on the ice must be cap-compliant."

Not everyone affected is thrilled. Lightning defenseman Victor Hedman, who played on Tampa Bay's 2020-21 title team while it ran roughly $18 million over what would have been the cap, called the tradeoff genuinely difficult for teams managing an injury to a franchise player: it's hard to know, he told Daily Faceoff, whether a star is "going to be back for Game 1 of the playoffs or the second round possibly," and building a compliant roster around that uncertainty falls squarely on general managers now.

The trade deadline changes too

The ripple effect lands well before the playoffs start. General managers weighing a deadline addition now have to ask a second question before pulling the trigger: will there still be room for this player once the injured star everyone's counting on comes back healthy? Acquire the wrong contract, and a team can find itself scratching a rental — or the returning star — just to stay compliant on a night that matters. Boston's Charlie McAvoy, whose team faced down a Tampa Bay roster it couldn't match dollar-for-dollar in 2021, called the change simple common sense: teams "shouldn't be able to field a roster that's $20 million over the cap," and the league, in his view, was overdue in agreeing.