NHL GMs say time will tell if new CBA rules restrict trade in 2025-26

DETROIT — It’s a new salary cap world, and NHL general managers will learn how to live in it.

At least that’s how Chicago’s Kyle Davidson framed it coming out of a meeting with his 31 counterparts, all 32 coaches, NHL commissioner Gary Bettman, deputy commissioner Bill Daly and executive vice president and director of hockey operations Colin Campbell.

We wondered if the immediate implementation of a playoff salary cap, new rules on long-term injury reserve and the elimination of a team’s ability to farm out salary retention to a third-party team after retaining salary themselves in a trade — three elements of the NHL and NHLPA’s newly-minted collective bargaining agreement being implemented immediately rather than in September of 2026, when the new CBA is set to begin — would restrict player movement.

“I think with any kind of implementation or new rules or guidelines, it’s always a little bit of an unknown until you get in there,” he said. “My personal thing was probably that something new we did this year was knowing what the salary cap was a couple of years out, and with the cap rising more than it has in the past, it potentially slowed some movement.

“Those are things you learn as you kind of enter into them, and with anything new that’s implemented in the future, we’ll probably just figure it out in the moment at league functions and stuff like that. When change comes, it’s going to alter behaviour, so I’d expect that to occur.”

It will certainly alter protocol.

Teams will now have to submit cap-compliant game rosters hours ahead of playoff games, which left us pondering the possibility of the term “game-time decision” going the way of the dinosaur.

“I think that remains to be seen,” said Winnipeg Jets GM Kevin Cheveldayoff. “A lot of the realities are, certainly in the playoffs, there are guys that are game-time decisions. There’s lots of guys that push things to the limit and are purely going to gauge from warmup. So, I don’t know that you’ll never fully eliminate that because that is a legitimate thing in hockey.”

Daly said the subject came up with one GM after the meeting and added, “The exact implementation details of the (playoff) cap are still being worked through.”

When asked if teams could submit a secondary roster to account for a last-minute swap of a player returning from injury for another player previously listed, Daly said, “That is a detail that there will obviously be an answer to, but there isn’t one yet.”

With the playoffs only beginning in April, there’s plenty of time to sort it out.

The NHL doesn’t need more time to put the new rules regarding LTIR and salary cap retention into place. 

Neither Daly nor Bettman would confirm every single proviso of the new CBA immediately taking effect at the start of this upcoming season. Bettman just said a memorandum from the league would inevitably detail the changes.

As for one of the ones we know about for sure, neither Davidson nor Cheveldayoff felt the changes to salary retention rules would limit trade activity.

“There’s more money in the system, so maybe there’s less of a need to go down the road of double retention,” said Davidson.

Cheveldayoff said, “I don’t think it will make a big difference. I never utilized it, so it’s not something that’s being taken away from me.”

What teams had regularly used under the old LTIR rules was the ability to replace injured players with players making equal salary during the regular season, before reactivating their injured player for the playoffs, when there was no salary cap. 

But that loophole is now closed.

“I think it’s fair,” said Philadelphia Flyers GM Daniel Briere on Tuesday, ahead of a less formal get-together between all attendees of this meeting. “I didn’t have an issue with it before — the rules were in place, and everyone played by them. Now we’ll have new rules to play by.”

Multiple other GMs we polled at meetings held in Florida last March expressed that they were in favour of a playoff salary cap and felt it was better for the competitive balance and integrity of the league.

• Current NHL officials Kelly Sutherland and Wes McCauley had a back-and-forth with the league’s coaches… partly to discuss back-and-forths at team benches between officials and coaches during games.

As Campbell said, “It was important to (the coaches), and it’s important to us, too, when they cross the line we don’t want them to cross.”

Coaches also gave their feedback to the officials and the league on issues like embellishment and challenges.

“Just to add to that, when we went around the room and had each coach give some input on officiating,” said Bettman, ”I think the consensus in the room, everything that was being talked about was tweaks, and I think overall, more than overall, virtually unanimously, everybody feels officiating is in a really good place… You try to get to perfection, and that’s an effort we’ll have. But it’s a game of human elements…

“The sense in the room was the officiating is really good, and it’s really unfair to the world’s best officials in the toughest game to officiate when they get criticized on occasion, and so I think that was a good session that gave everybody the opportunity to be heard.”

• The Canadian Hockey League and United States Hockey League (junior leagues in both Canada and the U.S.) gave presentations at the meetings to, as Bettman put it, “emphasize their importance to the game.” 

Daly said both leagues “wanted to express their views with respect to the current landscape,” and that “the CHL is concerned with what we negotiated with the Players’ Association with regards to the 19-year-old players, so a lot of their discussions focused on that.”

The new CBA has a proviso to allow one 19-year-old player per team to play for their American Hockey League affiliate, but that still needs to be ironed out with the CHL once the agreement between their league and the NHL can be reopened in June of 2026.