When the Montreal Canadiens lost to the Tampa Bay Lightning in the 2021 Stanley Cup Final, Conn Smythe Trophy winner Nikita Kucherov was seen celebrating the win wearing a t-shirt that read “18M Over The Cap.” Finding a loophole and exploiting it is one thing, but bragging about it is quite another.

I’ve long been advocating that it made no sense for the cap limit not to apply in the playoffs. Sure, LTIR has a reason to exist, and it allows teams to replace players they lose to injury during the season. However, once they are healed and ready to return, their team should have been made to decide which players they elect to sit.

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It won't be the fix the new CBA brings though, according to Frank Seravalli, teams will only receive LTIR amount equal to the prior season's average league salary (which this year was around $2.8 M), unless the injured player is definitely out for the entirety of the playoffs, I assume that in case of a miraculous recovery, they wouldn't be eligible to dress. As for the playoff salary cap will consist of 20 players in the lineup and the rosters can be adjusted from game-to-game.

Amazingly, we had to wait for a new CBA for that to be fixed. One might have thought that once the issue had been identified, teams would want to shut the loophole and win the Stanley Cup fairly and squarely, but instead, teams continued to exploit it and were content to win that way.

We’ll never know what would have happened in the Summer of 2021 if the Lightning hadn’t been $18M over the cap, but at least now, the league has taken the means to ensure that the toughest Trophy in the world to win cannot be grabbed by using a cheat code like video games could be beaten in the 80s. I don’t know about you, but for me, beating Mario Bros. 3 using the flute cheat just wasn’t as satisfying as doing it all by myself, and I was about 10 years old...I would have thought that grown men would have had more pride than that. Now, about those tax rates…

Photo credit: Kim Klement-Imagn Images

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