The Montreal Canadiens have been a cap team, or quite close to it, almost every year since the salary cap was introduced in 2005.
There was that weird year where they said they couldn’t afford to re-sign Andrei Markov and then just didn’t spend up to the cap, but that was like a decade ago and we are clearly all over it so there is no need to bring it up ever again.
Recently, they have been tiptoeing around the cap because Carey Price, and Shea Weber as well for a time, have been on long term injured reserve. This meant the Habs could exceed the cap by the amount of money they put on LTIR, but they had to maximize that amount by spending to the limit on day one of the regular season.
It does give them maximum money to spend, but also very little wiggle room to call players up as they are technically at the salary cap all season long.
Next season, it finally looks like the Canadiens could have some flexibility to do whatever they want when it comes to the salary cap. That is because the upper limit of the salary cap is projected to increase greatly ahead of the 2023-24 season.
Over the odd Covid years when team’s played games in empty buildings and many games were just cancelled, the players continued to be paid their full salaries. The players and owners have an agreement that they split revenues 50/50, but this did not occur in the 2019-20 or 2020-21 seasons.
At that point, the players owed the owners millions of dollars and worked out an agreement that they would pay it back over the next few seasons. That debt is scheduled to be paid off this season, which will allow the salary cap to finally start to increase once again.
Commissioner Gary Bettman announced at the Board of Governor’s meeting yesterday that a preliminary projection of the salary cap for next season would see it set between $87-88 million.
This would put the Habs in a fantastic position. The current salary cap is $83.5 million so we are looking at an increase of about $4 million. The Canadiens also have Tanner Pearson and Sean Monahan’s contracts coming off the books which adds another $5.25 million to their available space.
The only RFAs they need to re-sign are Jesse Ylonen, Justin Barron and Arber Xhekaj so the team is going to have plenty of options next offseason. The Canadiens already have about $74.5 million committed to the 2023-24 season so they will head into the summer with at least $13 million in cap space.
That gives them incredible flexibility to get in on the top free agents like William Nylander, Steven Stamkos, Connor Hellebuyck and Elias Lindholm.
They could also use the cap space to just have Carey Price on the roster without using LTIR giving them more flexibility during the season. Or, they could add players on bad contracts, as well as high draft picks, like they did when they acquired Monahan and a first round pick a year ago.
Whatever they choose to do, they will surely have the ability to pull it off as they will go in to the offseason with tons of cap space.
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