NHL Salary Cap Set To Explode Over Next Few Seasons

The Carolina Hurricanes are in a very good position to take advantage of the rising salary cap.

Per NHL insiders, the league sent a memo to all 32 teams today announcing the anticipated salary cap and floor for the next three seasons in agreement with the NHLPA.

Starting next season, the salary cap is set to skyrocket, reaching crazy new heights by the 2027-28 season.

Those salary cap projections are as follows:

2025-26: $95.5 million ($70.6 million floor)
2026-27: $104 million ($76.9 million floor)
2027-28: $113.5 million ($83.9 million floor)

The current cap is $88 million, which was a nice and steady pay bump after a few years of the flat cap following COVID-19's effect on hockey revenues, but this new projection is going to completely change the current salary structure around the league.

Currently, Toronto Maple Leafs center Auston Matthews has the highest cap hit in the league at $13.25 million per year.

Matthews leads all centers in pay, but here's the rest of the current top active earners by position:

Winger - Artemi Panarin ($11,642,857)
Defenseman - Erik Karlsson ($11,500,000)
Goaltender - Sergei Bobrovsky ($10,000,000)

However, starting next season a few new names enter the fray with already inked extensions.

Center - Leon Draisaitl ($14,000,000)
Goaltender - Igor Shesterkin ($11,500,000)

"Both Clubs and Players have sought a certain level of predictability with respect to Payroll ranges from year to year and over time for advance planning capabilities," said NHL Deputy Commissioner Bill Daly to TSN's Pierre Lebrun. "In reviewing our numbers with the Players’ Association as part of our collective bargaining, we finally felt like we were in a position to give them that. It’s not 'absolute certainty,' but maybe it’s the next best thing.''

With this level of rise in the coming years, those numbers will pale in comparison to new deals and we'll have to start reassessing not only how we view the value of top players, but middle of the lineup and depth players as well.

It's going to be a good time to be a free agent, that's for sure.

With that upper limit set, the Carolina Hurricanes are projected to have $38.71 million in cap space next season (2025-26) and up to $71.76 million by 2027-28.

The team will have Brent Burns, Dmitry Orlov and Frederik Andersen's contracts coming off the books and Taylor Hall, Mikko Ratanen, Jack Roslovic, Jesper Fast, Eric Robinson, Juha Jaaska and Tyson Jost will all be UFAs.

With that amount of space, they can obviously bring back more than a few of those players if they choose to and work to upgrade the group too.

Luckily for the Canes, they have nearly all of their core pieces locked in long term:

And beyond those core pieces, they have more than a few key pieces signed for a few more years as well:

The team is in a tremendous position cap-wise and that rising cap is just going to allow them to really go hard on team building over the next three seasons.

A Mikko Rantanen extension, even making him the highest paid winger in the league, will hardly make a dent in Carolina's ability to build a high-end, competitive team so that too shouldn't be much of an issue at all to get done.

Even with that, I wouldn't be surprised to see a few more blockbuster moves with Carolina's name attached in the coming years given their wealth of prospects, salary cap situation and direction of the team.

(Salary numbers are from puckpedia.com)

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