I asked one of the league’s capologists the other day, what would happen if an NHL team didn’t meet the salary cap floor.
The person was initially befuddled by the question. “What do you mean?” they answered. Even the thought of it was strange to this person.
I then went on to explain how I was playing around with CapFriendly’s armchair-GM feature recently, and it wasn’t until I started building a mock Blackhawks 2023-24 roster that I realized just how far below the cap they’re going to start. With this offseason, if Patrick Kane, Jonathan Toews, Max Domi and Andreas Athanasiou’s cap hits are removed. That’s $27 million there. You throw in Caleb Jones’ expiring contract and Duncan Keith’s recapture penalty decreasing by nearly $3.5 million, and you have nearly $32 million in lost cap space.
Blackhawks general manager Kyle Davidson doesn’t have to replace all of that, but he will have to fill in some of it. The cap floor will likely be around $62 million, and it won’t be an easy feat for Davidson to get there.
Let’s start with the players who are already signed for next season. That list includes Seth Jones ($9.5 million cap hit), Tyler Johnson ($5 million), Connor Murphy ($4.4 million), Jake McCabe ($4.4 million), Petr Mrazek ($3.8 million), Jason Dickinson ($2.65 million), Colin Blackwell ( $1.2 million), Sam Lafferty ($1.15 million), MacKenzie Entwistle ($800,000), Reese Johnson ($800,000), Taylor Raddysh ($758,333) and Boris Katchouk ($758,333). The Blackhawks also have to pay $1,938,456 in a recapture for Keith and about $1.35 million next season for buying out Brett Connolly and Henrik Borgstrom. Those 12 players plus those other payments equate to $38,105,123, leaving them nearly $24 million under the cap floor. For those who are constantly asking if Seth Jones is going to be traded, this is one reason why he won’t, at least in the near future. The Blackhawks actually need his substantial cap hit.
Some of the Blackhawks’ prospects are expected to make the jump to the NHL next season, too. Let’s include Kevin Korchinski ($950,000), Lukas Reichel ($925,000), Alex Vlasic ($916,667) and Isaak Phillips ($859,167) to the NHL roster. That would bring the Blackhawks to $41,755,957, still more than $20 million from the lower limit.
The Blackhawks do have a few restricted free agents they’ll like to re-sign. Philipp Kurashev and Arvid Soderblom are the main two, and both are projected to be on the NHL roster next season. Let’s say both are given two-year contracts with $1.5 million cap hits. That might be a little generous, but the Blackhawks can afford to be a little generous. It’s unclear whether the Blackhawks will re-sign Caleb Jones. They do have a number of young defensemen on the verge. Without him, that brings the Blackhawks to 18 players and a cap total of $44,755,957. That would leave them $17,244,043 under the cap floor.
If the Blackhawks land one of the top-three picks in the 2024 draft, you would assume that player joins the NHL team next season, too. That would be another player with a $950,000 cap hit. Again, not much help financially.
So, what can the Blackhawks do? You’re probably only talking about three or four NHL roster spots that are technically unfilled, but that can be easily manipulated if the Blackhawks wanted to open a few more spots. The first logical route would be for the Blackhawks to take on a bad contract or two. They’ve already done that to some extent in recent years. Maybe the Vegas Golden Knights want to move Shea Weber’s contract? They don’t need to now, but that could change this offseason. There are usually a handful of contracts teams are seeking to get out of. The Blackhawks are still open to that and may look to that path again even at this trade deadline, but they are becoming more roster conscious for the coming years. They’d prefer not to be in this current rebuild stage for too long.
The second option is paying (probably overpaying) for free agents. Kane and Toews could obviously be sitting there on the market, but it doesn’t sound like that’s a real possibility, at least at this point. The Blackhawks have liked what Max Domi and Andreas Athanasiou have brought to the team on and off the ice as veterans this season. If neither fetches much at the trade deadline, there is a chance the Blackhawks could just keep them, re-sign one or both to short-term deals and give them a bump in pay. There haven’t been discussions about that possibility yet, but the Blackhawks don’t hate that idea.
It sounds like Davidson is more likely to start making some signing splashes the following offseason, in the summer of 2024, but maybe he sees who is available this offseason. If he’s going to commit term to someone, it will have to be someone he thinks can complement his upcoming top-five draft pick and play the way Luke Richardson wants to play. Bo Horvat, Dylan Larkin, David Pastrnak, Andrei Kuzmenko, Vladimir Tarasenko and Michael Bunting are some of the potential unrestricted free agents after this season.
Before you start to shout one way or another about any of those players, a number of them probably never make it to free agency, and there are others the Blackhawks probably have no interest in. But some way or another the Blackhawks are going to have to get to the cap floor.
Which brings me back to the capologist, who can’t be named because he works for a team. Their answer ultimately was that the NHL would never allow a team to not reach the cap floor. “It would never get that far,” they said.
And looking at the CBA, there is no written penalty for not meeting the lower limit. It just reads, “No Club shall, after commencement of the regular season, be permitted to have an Averaged Club Salary that falls below the Lower Limit for that League Year.”
Needless to say, that’s not an option, and the Blackhawks have some financial work ahead of them.
(Photo of Kyle Davidson: Chase Agnello-Dean / NHLI via Getty Images)
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