As of right now, the
Vancouver Canucks have a decent amount of cap space available. And if they play their cards right – and in the same general way they’ve played them in recent years – they’ll eventually have even more cap space, too.
Currently, the Canucks have
a little more than $3 million available against their projected cap spending for the 2025-26 season. It might not sound like a lot, but it does leave the Canucks with the 20th-most cap space in the league.
That might not sound like much, either, but it’s more than the Canucks have traditionally had available in the offseason.
We know that some of this space will eventually be allocated to new additions to the team, whether that be a late-summer free agent signing or a trade at some point in the next couple of months. But we also know that, regardless of what moves they make, the Canucks should still find themselves under the new, $95.5 million cap ceiling for the 2025-26 season. Because they have to. With no current injuries to worry about – knock on wood – the Canucks won’t have the opportunity for any LTIR shenaniganry this time around. Whether it’s this same $3 million or so, or whether it’s only a few thousand dollars, the Canucks will be at least a little under the cap to start the year.
So where do they go from there?
You may have heard that the newest collective bargaining agreement reached between the NHL and NHLPA has ended the process of ‘papering’ players down to the minors. This refers to re-assigning players to minor league teams, like the
Abbotsford Canucks, on off-days to temporarily remove that player’s daily cap hit from the NHL books – without any intention of having that player play for the minor league team.
It’s true that this process is ending with the new CBA…but not yet. The new CBA doesn’t take effect until the 2026-27 season.
Which is good news in Vancouver, because it’s something the Canucks utilized
a lot in 2024-25, especially in the early going. They were blessed by a number of players on the fringes of their roster being waiver-exempt, meaning they could be freely brought back and forth between Abbotsford and Vancouver without any risk of another team claiming them. And back and forth they went!
Folks like
Arshdeep Bains and
Linus Karlsson got really used to being papered back and forth last year. And the Canucks benefitted from the process – to an extent.
In short, it works like this:
-Teams have a yearly cap ceiling, a maximum amount they can spend on their roster for the entire year. This is the cap ceiling you hear about most frequently – the one set at $95.5 million for this upcoming season.
-Teams also have a daily spending limit. In essence, this means they’re never allowed to compose a roster that, if left unchanged, would eventually cross the yearly spending threshold. This is where talk of players’ ‘cap hits’ comes from.
-When a team doesn’t spend its maximum daily amount, it essentially leaves spending room available from that year-long total. And the longer they let that amount of ‘accrued cap space’ grow, the more they can do with it.
-Player cap hits are tallied daily, too. The basic formula is to take the yearly cap hit, or AAV, and divide it by the number of ‘days’ in the NHL schedule. Last year, it was 192. Where the cap limit comes in is in ensuring that the players on the roster’s daily cap hits don’t add up to something higher than the yearly cap when applied to all remaining days.
-Therefore, the fewer days remaining on the schedule, the less of that yearly cap needs to be kept available for new additions. This is why cap space accrues, because the longer it stays open, the more AAV it can accommodate.
-To give a concrete example, here, a team that has kept $1 million in cap space open (meaning they’re projected to spend $1 million less than the $95.5 million total) for the first three-quarters of the season can use that cap space to add a player with a $4 million cap hit for the last quarter of the season, because there’s only $1 million worth of daily cap hits left on that player’s compensation for the year.
It’s all a little counter-intuitive. If you’d like a more in-depth explanation, refer to our piece from last October,
found here.
The Canucks used this method to accrue several millions in cap space for the 2024-25 season. That would have allowed them to bring in essentially whatever new cap hits they wished at the 2025 Trade Deadline. In the end, the Canucks did not acquire anyone, and that cap space remained unspent. At the end of the day, the Canucks used their cap-saving techniques to effectively save money last year, ultimately spending less than the maximum $88 million in player salary they were allowed.
For fans paying some of the highest ticket prices in the league, this fact could be met with some chagrin. Of course, had the team been in a more competitive space at the deadline, that money probably would have been spent. Saving money to spend later remains the plan.
Anyway, accrual isn’t going anywhere. What is changing is that aforementioned ability to ‘paper’ players down the minors on off-days. Those off-days count as days in the schedule, too, so the ability to send a player down for even a day took their daily cap hit off the books, and left more room for accrual. In the future, teams will have to actually assign those players to their minor league teams for at least one game, which greatly complicates the process, especially with the AHL’s weekend-heavy schedule.
But, again, that change doesn’t take effect until 2026-27. For the 2025-26 season, the Canucks will – for the last time – still be able to utilize the ‘Abbotsford Shuffle’ to accrue cap space on off-days and, ideally, build up their ability to acquire players closer to the 2026 Deadline.
It just won’t be as easy.
As we said earlier, the Canucks were blessed with an inordinate number of waiver-exempt players on the fringes of their roster last year. Bains, Karlsson, Aatu Räty, Arturs Silovs,
Jonathan Lekkerimäki, Max Sasson, and etcetera. All were free to go back and forth to Abbotsford as much as the team wanted them to.
But of that list, only Lekkerimäki and Sasson’s waiver exemption remains into the 2025-26 season. And when we look at the projected roster of the 2025-26 Canucks, we see a very different picture when it comes to waivers.
DeBrusk ($5.5M) – Pettersson ($11.6M) – Boeser ($7.25M)
Höglander ($3M) – Chytil ($4.44M) – Kane ($5.13M)
O’Connor ($2.5M) – Blueger ($1.8M – Garland ($4.95M)
Karlsson ($775K) – Räty ($775K) – Sherwood ($1.5M)
Bains ($775K)
Hughes ($7.85M) – Hronek ($7.25M)
M. Pettersson ($5.5M) – Myers ($3M)
E. Pettersson ($838K)* – Willander ($950K)*
Forbort ($2M) – Mancini ($870K)*
Demko ($5M)
Lankinen ($4.5M)
Only the players listed with asterisks up there are waiver-exempt for the 2025-26 season. And, yes, that is a list that only includes the younger Elias Pettersson, Tom Willander, and
Victor Mancini – at least one of whom is almost certainly going to start the year in Abbotsford, anyway.
It’s a much less flexible roster than was the previous year’s. But it’s still set up for the Abbotsford Shuffle if the Canucks choose to utilize that tactic again this season – and we suspect they will.
How it will work is this: on off-days, the Canucks will likely paper two or three of Pettersson, Willander, and/or Mancini down to Abbotsford. This removes their daily cap hits (their AAV/number of days in schedule) from the books for however long they’re re-assigned, and that amount contributes to the effective accrual of cap for the year.
Again, for just this one last season, these players won’t have to actually suit up in Abbotsford.
The Canucks must maintain a minimum roster of 20 players at all times. But that still allows for them to send up to three players down on their off-days.
If the team were ever to be carrying all three of Pettersson, Willander, and Mancini at one time, they could send them all down and maximize the accrual. It seems likely that it will be more often the case that it’s just two of the three, but that still adds up. Oftentimes, the Canucks were papering down just Bains and/or Karlsson last year, and accrual still occurred to a meaningful degree.
There’s been speculation that the Canucks will either roll with a 22-player roster to accrue cap space on a more permanent basis (accomplished by cutting one of Willander or Mancini from the above roster). That’s definitely possible, but might leave the Canucks a little shorthanded on the injury-coverage front.
It’s also possible that the Canucks bring in a more veteran 8D to hold down that extra spot on the blueline, either via a signing or the promotion of someone internal like
Jett Woo. In that case, it’s also possible the team gets a little accrual done on off-days by waiving that extra player down to Abbotsford. It’s something they did a bit with Mark Friedman last year.
In any case, despite the vast reduction in waiver-exempt players between last season and this one, the Canucks are still set up to accrue via the Abbotsford Shuffle to essentially the same degree they were in 2024-25 – one or two players at a time, bit by bit.
One only hopes they’ll find a way to spend that accrued cap in 2025-26, as opposed to just sitting on it.
