Montreal Canadiens: NHL Salary Cap Set At $83.5 Million Next Season

The Montreal Canadiens are likely not looking to be big spenders this offseason, but they anxiously await the official word on the league’s upper limit of the salary cap like every other team in the league.

It has long since been rumoured that the cap would not rise much at all between this season and next, but it sounds like it is now official. Frank Seravalli of Daily Faceoff writes that the cap will go up from $82.5 million this season to $83.5 million next year.

The cap was rising quickly since its inception in 2005. It would often rise by a few million each offseason, but the Covid shortened seasons in 2019-20 and 2020-21 really put a halt on the rising salary cap. With fans not allowed in attendance, and some games just not played in the 2019-20 season and a short 56 game schedule in 2020-21, revenues dropped like a rock and unexpectedly.

What ended up happening was the players were still paid most of their contracts and the owners ate the big hit. Well, they did in the short term. Since getting back to more normal scheduling with fans in seats, the players have been giving up a percentage of their salary to the owners to make up for the debt the owners took on during Covid.

It appears that debt is nearly paid off but is not quite finalized yet. If it were paid off, the cap would jump a lot more than the $1 million it is moving up by this summer. That debt is expected to be paid off next season, which means we could see a big jump before the 2024-25 season.

That is good news for the Canadiens who are not expecting to contend next season anyway. They are not pushing up against the cap at this time and don’t need to shed salary so they were not relying on a big cap jump.

In fact, they could take advantage of this slowly rising cap by acquiring another overpriced player that a team is looking to get rid of like the Calgary Flames did with Sean Monahan a year ago.

Next offseason, the Canadiens will be looking to take a step forward in their rebuild and will have tons of cap flexibility to do so with the rising ceiling and the contracts of both Mike Hoffman and Joel Edmundson coming off the books .

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