Playoff cap and other potential rule changes
Posted: Fri Feb 27, 2026 3:16 am
As you may be aware, the NHL instituted a playoff cap for this season. I'm not actually entirely sure how it works and don't intend to investigate. However, the general idea is sound and is something we could implement. I have a proposal I've been mulling over for months but not fully nailed down, but first, some motivation:
There are basically two reasons to have a playoff cap. The first is "why not"? Playoff games are more important than regular season, so stopping cap counting at game 82 has always been arbitrary, and really only happens because the NHL pays out salaries in the regular season only.
The second is that LTIR allows for teams to play with elevated payrolls throughout the playoffs. This is less of an issue in EHEC because you know exactly when injured players come off LTIR and can't choose to keep them on IR when they're really healthy (cough Kucherov/Stone cough), and also there are fewer injuries in general, but it's still there. You just have to be lucky - the ideal situation is having a player injured a few days before the deadline, who returns right after game 82, giving you their full salary back in LTIR if you're already at the cap.
(There is another issue that it can be beneficial to have an expensive, waiver-ineligible youngster injured long-term, since you can send them down and accrue a lot of cap room before the deadline, which you can't for older, waiver-eligible players, but this is an issue that will have to wait for the offseason.)
Now back to the proposal...
How would it work? The simplest way is to just keep crunching cap numbers during the playoffs. I already modified the cap calculator to go past 82 games and in fact the MAXCAP/CAPSPACE columns in the cap thread have been using 100 games for a while now. I'm not sure if anyone noticed. (100 games is slightly arbitrary - I chose it because it's a nice round number and typically only the two finalists play more than 18 playoff games).
The difficult question is what to do if teams exceed the cap in the playoffs. Right now, if teams go over the cap I mostly just nag them incessantly to get under. That's not going to work in the playoffs because teams can't do much to change their cap hits - no buyouts are possible and newly signed players aren't eligible to play, and cap relief from sending down waiver-eligible players is small. So the only solution I can think of is to rule some players ineligible to play and not count their cap hits.
How would the players be selected, though? If GMs are allowed to pick, the obvious choice would be "my most overpaid/useless player", which could be someone earning >800k on the farm. That's to the GM's advantage and not even a penalty. So there needs to be a system to pick which player is ineligible and I haven't thought of a good one. If GMs get to pick there should be a minimum pro games played threshold, or something. If the selection is automatic then there needs to be an algorithm. Something like "the single player with the lowest salary that can get the team under the cap".
This last sticking point is why I didn't propose this earlier. There's also a bit of weirdness with picking the number of games for projected cap hits. Do we just stop once every team his 100 GP? That's still arbitrary. Should teams be forced to keep enough room to be under for 100 games, even if they're down 3-0 in the first round? Unclear.
Well, anyway, since it's very close to the trade deadline and the main effect from this change would be to lower how much salary teams can add for the deadline, I'll only declare it implemented if there's a solid majority of GMs in favour, and a good enough solution for the points I mentioned above. So, opine away.
An example calculation:
If a team spends 64 games @ 58M, they can go up to 67.1M at the deadline for the remaining 18 games in the season (9.1M cap room)
If the cap were counted for 100 games, they'd be able to to up to 63.5M (5.5M cap room)
There are basically two reasons to have a playoff cap. The first is "why not"? Playoff games are more important than regular season, so stopping cap counting at game 82 has always been arbitrary, and really only happens because the NHL pays out salaries in the regular season only.
The second is that LTIR allows for teams to play with elevated payrolls throughout the playoffs. This is less of an issue in EHEC because you know exactly when injured players come off LTIR and can't choose to keep them on IR when they're really healthy (cough Kucherov/Stone cough), and also there are fewer injuries in general, but it's still there. You just have to be lucky - the ideal situation is having a player injured a few days before the deadline, who returns right after game 82, giving you their full salary back in LTIR if you're already at the cap.
(There is another issue that it can be beneficial to have an expensive, waiver-ineligible youngster injured long-term, since you can send them down and accrue a lot of cap room before the deadline, which you can't for older, waiver-eligible players, but this is an issue that will have to wait for the offseason.)
Now back to the proposal...
How would it work? The simplest way is to just keep crunching cap numbers during the playoffs. I already modified the cap calculator to go past 82 games and in fact the MAXCAP/CAPSPACE columns in the cap thread have been using 100 games for a while now. I'm not sure if anyone noticed. (100 games is slightly arbitrary - I chose it because it's a nice round number and typically only the two finalists play more than 18 playoff games).
The difficult question is what to do if teams exceed the cap in the playoffs. Right now, if teams go over the cap I mostly just nag them incessantly to get under. That's not going to work in the playoffs because teams can't do much to change their cap hits - no buyouts are possible and newly signed players aren't eligible to play, and cap relief from sending down waiver-eligible players is small. So the only solution I can think of is to rule some players ineligible to play and not count their cap hits.
How would the players be selected, though? If GMs are allowed to pick, the obvious choice would be "my most overpaid/useless player", which could be someone earning >800k on the farm. That's to the GM's advantage and not even a penalty. So there needs to be a system to pick which player is ineligible and I haven't thought of a good one. If GMs get to pick there should be a minimum pro games played threshold, or something. If the selection is automatic then there needs to be an algorithm. Something like "the single player with the lowest salary that can get the team under the cap".
This last sticking point is why I didn't propose this earlier. There's also a bit of weirdness with picking the number of games for projected cap hits. Do we just stop once every team his 100 GP? That's still arbitrary. Should teams be forced to keep enough room to be under for 100 games, even if they're down 3-0 in the first round? Unclear.
Well, anyway, since it's very close to the trade deadline and the main effect from this change would be to lower how much salary teams can add for the deadline, I'll only declare it implemented if there's a solid majority of GMs in favour, and a good enough solution for the points I mentioned above. So, opine away.
An example calculation:
If a team spends 64 games @ 58M, they can go up to 67.1M at the deadline for the remaining 18 games in the season (9.1M cap room)
If the cap were counted for 100 games, they'd be able to to up to 63.5M (5.5M cap room)
