The Montreal Canadiens head into the offseason with one eye on the NHL’s salary cap. Teams can’t just spend freely anymore and need to keep the cap in mind when making trades and signing new players for the organization.
The salary cap was set at $82.5 million in 2022-23. The players still owe money to the owners from the Covid shortened seasons. Players and owners are supposed to split hockey-related revenues 50/50, but when games were cancelled and fans were not allowed into arenas in 2020 and 2021, the players were still paid their contracts.
The owners took a hit at that time and the players salaries have been scaled back somewhat each season since to make up the difference. That difference is close to being paid off but the owners are not quite being made whole yet. That means a modest jump in the cap is expected this offseason.
Right now, the projections have the cap going up just $1 million to $83.5 million next season. A year from now, when that debt if fully paid off, the cap is expected to jump by a much greater margin.
But that isn’t going to happen yet, so where does it leave the Canadiens this offseason?
The Canadiens already have 12 forwards signed heading into next season. There are nine defensemen who played regularly (when healthy) in the NHL as well and two goaltenders. This includes:
Forwards (13): Nick Suzuki, Cole Caufield, Brendan Gallagher, Josh Anderson, Mike Hoffman, Christian Dvorak, Joel Armia, Kirby Dach, Sean Monahan, Jake Evans, Rem Pitlick, Juraj Slafkovsky and Michael Pezzetta.
Defensemen (9): Michael Matheson, Joel Edmundson, David Savard, Jordan Harris, Justin Barron, Arber Xhekaj, Kaiden Guhle, Johnathan Kovacevic and Chris Wideman.
Goaltenders (2): Jake Allen and Sam Montembeault.
That’s a roster of 24 players who are signed and their combined cap hit is $72,255,833. Of course, the team won’t carry nine defenders which could mean Wideman is out, but they may also have to make room for goaltender Cayden Primeau who is waiver-eligible so that is a negligible swap. Primeau makes $127,500 more so the cap total would be at $72,383,333.
The Canadiens also have a cap penalty of $833,333 for buying out Karl Alzner’s contract and were hit with a bonus overage of $1,170,000 for performance bonuses hit last season that did not fit under last year’s salary cap. That brings their cap hit to $74,386,666.
We are also missing the elephant in the room at this point. Carey Price’s $10.5 million salary still has three years remaining on it and needs to be included. The Canadiens have two options. The first is to try and fit Price in under the salary cap, which they would need to tinker but could technically do if there are no other signings or trades. They also would not be able to re-sign pending free agents like Denis Gurianov or Jonathan Drouin.
They could re-sign a player like RFA Rafael Harvey-Pinard or Jesse Ylonen to a low salary and have them replace a current player like Rem Pitlick. If Pitlick were sent down his entire $1.1 million cap hit would be off the books and replacing him with Harvey-Pinard would balance, and possibly even reduce, the cap hit.
Adding Price to the current total listed above would give them a total of $84,886,666 (assuming RHP makes $1.1 million and Pitlick is waived and sent down) which is already over the cap by about $1.4 million. If Ylonen is also re-signed for about $900,000 and a player like Xhekaj is sent down to make roster space, the team would have 13 forwards and seven defensemen and the cap hit would stay the same.
This would give the team little flexibility as they would have to carry less players to reduce their cap hit. Obviously, it isn’t ideal carrying three goaltenders to begin with so this likely means Primeau is on waivers and either picked up by another team or sent to the minors. Removing his cap hit brings the total down to $83,996,666. This would mean they could only carry 12 forwards or six defensemen from day one of the season.
Option 2 would be to put Price’s salary back on LTIR and have about $10 million to spend this offseason. This would give the team great flexibility heading into 2023-24, but they may have to make a little room for a bonus overage once again the following season.
In this scenario, the team could acquire a star player (Dubois) easily or make a trade like their Sean Monahan deal from a year ago and get a draft pick for taking on salary. Pretty much anything is on the table if they are willing to place Price back on LTIR for the year.
If they don’t want to put Price on LTIR, they could look to move out a salary via trade like Edmundson’s ($3.5 million) or Hoffman’s ($4.5 million) and then have that much space available to play with in the offseason. This would avoid a cap penalty the following season as well.
The Canadiens could have a fairly conservative offseason and keep Price off LTIR, or they could put him on LTIR and have the freedom to do whatever they please. It will be interesting to see which route they take.
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