NHL GMs frustrated by new salary cap rules at trade deadline

Some NHL teams told ESPN that they’re frustrated by the impact that the league’s expedited salary cap rules have had ahead of Friday’s trade deadline.

The new collective bargaining agreement between the NHL and the NHLPA, which was announced in July, begins Sept. 16. The league, however, moved up a handful of new rules governing the salary cap to the 2025-26 season and only briefed its general managers about those changes last September.

“Teams made plans and then, in September, the league changes the rules. It’s bush league,” one NHL team executive told ESPN. “All of a sudden, if you’re one of these teams that’s been kind of planning a certain way, they just changed the rules on you.”

One NHL player agent said the expedited rules should have been announced when the new CBA was finalized.

“Everybody would’ve preferred the new rules to kick in on July 1 if they were going to be applied to this season. Instead, they were announced right before the start of the regular season and it blindsided a lot of people,” the agent told ESPN.

NHL deputy commissioner Bill Daly told ESPN that the new CBA rules were explained to the general managers last June.

“We made clear that the timing of implementation was still an open issue. Certainly they knew or should have known that it was a possibility, and likely also knew we were going to push for early implementation,” Daly said via email on Tuesday.

The NHLPA declined comment.

The biggest rule changes targeted playoff teams that created postseason lineups that were over the regular-season salary cap. For example, a team that places a high-salaried player on long-term injured reserve (LTIR) could utilize his open salary cap space to acquire new players. But if that injured player returns when the playoffs start — something that has become commonplace in the NHL for some franchises — that team could have a lineup that exceeds the regular-season salary cap with no repercussions.

To combat that trend, the new CBA created a de facto “playoff salary cap,” where teams must submit a 20-player game-day lineup whose “averaged club salary” is under the “upper limit” of the regular-season salary cap for that team.

“I wish there was a little more consultation on how the playoff salary cap might work,” one NHL general manager told ESPN. “It’s like, these playoff rules are an issue that we didn’t even know about, and now we’ve got to worry about this all year.'”

In addition, LTIR rules were changed so teams could only replace an injured player’s salary up to the previous season’s average league salary, rather than replace his full salary cap hit. The only way to utilize the full salary cap space was to declare that injured player out for the regular season and the entirety of the playoffs.

The Dallas Stars just did this with injured forward Tyler Seguin. They had been using $3.82 million of Seguin’s $9.85 million in salary cap relief. After declaring him out for the season, now they can use the full amount.

Finally, the new CBA limited trades with “double retention” on a player’s salary, in which two different teams retain a percentage of a player’s cap hit to facilitate that player ending up with a third team. The new rule states there needs to be 75 regular-season days between trades in which that player’s salary is retained, making them logistically unreasonable at the deadline.

One general manager told ESPN that teams might not have realized the timing aspect of the double-retention rule, in which a team would have had to acquire a salary-retained player by Dec. 2, 2025, to retain on that player again at the trade deadline.

“There will be 2-3 trades that won’t happen because double-retention isn’t an option,” another NHL general manager told ESPN. “But what it’s actually going to do is even the playing field for the playoffs in a way it hasn’t been in recent years.”

Another factor at his trade deadline is the salary cap, which is set at $95.5 million this season and projected to rise to at least $104 million next season. As the NHL saw at last summer’s free agent market, many teams are re-signing their pending free agents rather than having to make a deadline-based decision on their future.

“It’s not like this humongous group of teams are just selling off,” Minnesota Wild GM Bill Guerin said. “And even so, the way that the cap’s gone up, teams can keep their players. They can sign who they have. And so we’ll just see what’s out there.”

With the clock ticking towards Friday’s 3 p.m. ET deadline, there’s some disagreement about how the rest of the week will unfold.

“It’s dead out there, man,” one general manager told ESPN. “You have some teams spending to the cap and some teams spending close to the cap, but not everyone is spending close to the cap. So when their players are free agents, they have the money in the system to re-sign them.”

One NHL player agent, however, said they expect the week will be busy, but without many “earth-shaking deals.”

“I think we’re going to see a lot of deals involving players that make $1.5 million or less, on expiring contracts,” the agent told ESPN.

Whatever the volume might be, NHL team executives agree that the expedited CBA rules have shifted the landscape at this trade deadline.

“I think the CBA stuff is still unfolding as we go along, whether it’s the cap counting for the playoffs or term limits or some of things that exist,” Boston Bruins GM Don Sweeney said. “Those are things we have to get in and live [with] and figure out how they’re going to do.

“We’ll know at the deadline whether or not teams were handcuffed a bit. I think moving forward, it probably loosens up. But I can’t forecast for 32 teams.”