A playoff salary cap is coming to the NHL. GMs get a calculator to help them navigate it

NEW YORK (AP) — Gone are the days of NHL teams stashing players on long-term injured reserve through the end of the regular season and dressing them at the start of the playoffs.

Starting this spring, the lineup for each game must fit under the salary cap, which until now did not apply in the postseason. As part of the adjustment, the league added a playoff cap calculator to the SAP-NHL Front Office App that general managers and other executives have been using for more than a year.

“Once we were going to cap-compliant rosters for playoff games, we needed something that would enable us to do it in real time,” Commissioner Gary Bettman told The Associated Press. “It was an issue that a lot of people were concerned about. I’m glad we were able to solve it conceptually, and I’m glad that SAP and Central Registry were able to create a tool that made it realistic for teams to comply with this in real time.”

The rule change was part of the collective bargaining agreement reached with the players union last summer. It comes after years of complaints about the LTIR loophole, which helped numerous teams load up at the trade deadline and go on deep playoff runs and even win the Stanley Cup.

Dougie Hamilton infamously said after he and Carolina got eliminated by Tampa Bay in the second round in 2021, “We lost to a team that’s $18 million over the cap.”

Under the terms of the CBA, teams don’t have to have their entire playoff roster under the cap ceiling, but annual salaries of the skaters and goaltenders dressed for each game cannot exceed $95.5 million.

The projector planning tool, which the AP was given a demonstration of, allows users to mix and match lineups to see if they’re cap-compliant. The Edmonton Oilers, for example, will need to fix Leon Draisaitl’s $14 million cap hit when the star forward is back from the injury that is sidelining him for the rest of the regular season.

“You do it and it tells you if it doesn’t work, and it lets you pick and choose and substitution,” Bettman said. “It’s absolutely ingenious.”

Initially introduced for iPads, the app has been accessible on iPhones since December. The playoff cap calculator publicly unveiled by the league on Tuesday has been available since early February, just before the roster freeze prior to the Olympic break, and NHL VP of Digital Business Development Chris Foster said usage has increased significantly across all 32 teams.

“Introducing on iPhone, the playoff cap projector — those weren’t in our original timelines,” Foster said, acknowledging the scenario-building was first considered a trading and free agency tool before the CBA changes came about. “We quickly shifted. It’s a credit to our Central Registry group. They flagged right away this is going to be needed, and we knew it was coming before the teams really knew about it, so it was their leadership that helped drive this change in the roadmap.”

Daniel Beringer, SAP’s Global Head of Technology and Innovation and Global Sponsorships, said the giant task of importing contract data took a lot of time putting in digital form what used to be in paper binders, but once that was completed, it is now faster to make additions on the fly.

“I would argue if the commissioner would ask for an app for his new Apple Watch, he could get that in a week or two now,” Beringer said. “It’s getting easier and easier to have additional functionality.”

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