The Vancouver Canucks seemed to take inspiration from their next-door neighbours at Cirque du Soleil Vancouver, as they performed all kinds of salary cap acrobatics last season.
General manager Patrik Allvin dumped salary in the offseason, trading Ilya Mikheyev to the Chicago Blackhawks and sending a fourth-round pick to the Colorado Avalanche for them to take on Tucker Poolman's salary, ensuring that they didn't need to use the cap relief from Long-Term Injured Reserve (LTIR) to be cap compliant to start the season.
That allowed the Canucks to accrue cap space throughout the season, allowing them to take advantage of the close proximity of their AHL affiliate, the Abbotsford Canucks. They frequently shuttled waiver-exempt players, like Aatu Räty, Max Sasson, and Arshdeep Bains, between Vancouver and Abbotsford to maximize their space under the salary cap each day, ensuring that they accrued as much cap space as possible by the NHL trade deadline.
Linus Karlsson, for example, was moved multiple times in the space of five days in early February: sent down to Abbotsford on Monday, recalled to Vancouver on Tuesday, sent back down to Abbotsford on Wednesday, recalled once more on Saturday, then sent back down again that same Saturday. Each day that Karlsson spent in the AHL gave the Canucks a little bit more cap space to work with for the rest of the season.
Then the Canucks did absolutely nothing at the trade deadline, rendering all of their acrobatics moot.
Still, the season served as a solid test case for the Canucks to continue making savvy salary cap moves in the future. There's just one issue: the new memorandum of understanding (MOU) that amends the collective bargaining agreement (CBA) between the NHL and the NHLPA has essentially removed any motivation to make those moves.
Paper loans and playoff salary caps
While the current CBA does not expire until September 15, 2026, some of the changes to the CBA will be implemented immediately, while others will come into effect in September.
One of the changes that will be deferred has a major impact on the Canucks: contracts signed before September 15, 2026 will be under the rules of the current CBA. That means Quinn Hughes can sign a maximum-length eight-year extension with the Canucks next summer, but will only be able to sign a six-year contract with a new team if he goes to free agency in 2027.
But two changes coming this season will make it more difficult to accrue cap space during the regular season and also severely downplay the importance of accruing cap space in the first place.
One change coming this season is a restriction on paper loans to the AHL. Previously, teams could reassign players to the AHL purely on paper without that player actually having to report to the AHL to play games.
The new MOU changes the rule, requiring players sent down to the AHL to report and play in at least one game before they can be called back up to the NHL. The scenario where Linus Karlsson was sent down and recalled five times in the space of five days won't be possible in the coming season, which might ease some of the traffic jams on Highway 1.
More importantly, the NHL will be implementing a playoff salary cap. This ends the loophole that allowed teams to place a player on LTIR during the regular season, then bring him back in the playoffs when the salary cap no longer existed.
Teams that were able to take advantage of this loophole gained a major advantage in the playoffs, allowing them to dress lineups that would have exceeded the salary cap by millions of dollars.
Last season, with Matthew Tkachuk and his $9.5 million cap hit on LTIR, the Florida Panthers were able to add Seth Jones and Brad Marchand at the trade deadline. In the final game of the 2025 Stanley Cup Final, the Panthers would have been approximately $5 million over the salary cap under the new playoff cap rules in the MOU.
But the change won't just affect how teams use LTIR next season. It will also make accruing cap space largely pointless.
The idea of accruing cap space during the regular season is to give a team more room to add a player later in the season. The simplified example of how this works, provided by Puckpedia, is that if a team is $500,000 under the cap at the beginning of the season, they can add a player with a $1 million cap hit halfway through the season. Essentially, a team is only responsible for the proportion of the cap hit of a player for when he's actually on their roster — around 25 per cent of the cap hit for a player acquired at the trade deadline.
The addition of a playoff salary cap, however, means that a team is responsible for the full freight of a player's cap hit if he's in their playoff lineup.
To use the simplified example, the team with $500,000 in cap space at the beginning of the season that adds a player with a $1 million cap hit will be perfectly cap compliant during the regular season, but will be $500,000 over the salary cap in the playoffs, as the player's full-season cap hit will count against the playoff salary cap.
Now, there's still some wiggle room to work with. The playoff salary cap only applies to players who actually dress for a game: the cap hits of players in the press box won't count. But that still limits what teams will be able to do at the trade deadline with any cap space they've accrued throughout the season.
Combine that with the NHL also removing "double retention" trades, where two teams would use a third party to retain additional salary for a player, and it seems likely that the 2026 trade deadline will be awfully boring.
What does this mean for the Canucks?
Right now, the Canucks have plenty of cap space after trading Dakota Joshua to the Toronto Maple Leafs. They can potentially use that cap space to add another player, presumably a centre.
The change to the MOU reduces some of the incentive to wait to use that cap space, as they previously could have stalled as long as possible to give them the ability to add a more expensive player later in the season. Now, whoever the Canucks add will have to fit under the playoff salary cap.
Ultimately, this ought to be a benefit to the Canucks' waiver-exempt players, who won't have to deal with being constantly shuttled between the NHL and AHL, moves that cost players on two-way contracts thousands of dollars in salary over the course of the season.
Of course, sending players down to the AHL will still save the Canucks' ownership from having to pay those thousands of dollars, so maybe we'll still see plenty of player movement between Vancouver and Abbotsford in the coming season.
