The NHL’s salary cap this season is $95.5 million. The floor, or the amount teams must reach to maintain competitive balance, is $70.6 million. The team that took the ice in gold last night made a combined $43.2 million.
That’s right, without Vegas’ five Olympians and injuries to William Karlsson, Brett Howden, and Carter Hart, the Golden Knights iced a roster that used just 45% of the available salary cap.
And they won!
Not including Alex Pietrangelo, the nine players who were unavailable last night make a total of $57.4 million, a whopping 60% of a team’s salary cap. Add in Pietrangelo’s $8.8 million, and the group of missing players was just $4.4 million away from reaching the salary cap floor. VGK played with just 39% of their payroll.
Meanwhile, on the other bench, the Kings iced a roster with a combined salary of $82.6 million. Vegas played $39.4 million short of their opponent, trailed in the 3rd period, and still walked away with a multi-goal victory.
Unsurprisingly, last night’s game represented the largest amount of salary ever sidelined in VGK history. Since the expansion season, it was also the lowest expenditure on players the team has ever iced in a single game.
The NHL dropped some news yesterday morning that will likely come as music to the ears of Golden Knights fans. The NHL and NHLPA released a forecasted salary cap for the next three seasons, with significant bumps each year.
The NHL and NHLPA are forecasting significant salary cap bumps on the current $88M ceiling in the coming years. It's a great time to be hitting free agency.
The salary cap for the current 2024-25 season is $88 million which means an increase of more than $7 million is on the horizon. Initial estimates from earlier this year had next year’s increase at closer to $4 or 5 million, which means the Golden Knights, and everyone else in the league, will have a lot more money to work with this offseason.
Vegas spent the majority of 2024 locking up major pieces for the future. Tomas Hertl, Noah Hanifin, Shea Theodore, Brayden McNabb, Brett Howden, and Keegan Kolesar all found themselves tied to the Golden Knights through at least the end of the 2027-28 season. However, crucial pieces still remain hanging in the balance both this summer as well as the next two.
Now that we have a better idea of where the salary cap is headed, we can look into VGK’s contract situations to show what type of work needs to be done to the roster.
2025-26 Season Forwards Under Contract: Eichel, Stone, Hertl, Karlsson, Barbashev, Roy, Howden, Dorofeyev, Kolesar Defensemen Under Contract: Pietrangelo, Hanifin, Theodore, McNabb, Whitecloud, Hutton, Korczak Goalies Under Contract:
Unfortunately, the offseason is here. By the time it’s over, the Golden Knights will look quite a bit different than they did when they shook hands with the Dallas Stars on Cinco de Mayo.
In an attempt to simplify the numbers, here’s a primer on what the Golden Knights have to work with this summer.
The easiest way to look at the salary cap is to strip it down to the barest of bones roster. To ice an actual hockey team, an organization must have 12 forwards, six defensemen, and two goalies.
Here’s where the Golden Knights sit at each of the positions.
On Monday, Bruins goalie Linus Ullmark was awarded the Vezina Trophy and named the NHL’s best goaltender. The next day, Ullmark was rumored to be a trade candidate this summer. After a horrific collapse in the first round of the playoffs, Boston’s front office is aggressively shedding salary and is looking to trim the fat in net.
It crossed my mind. I’m not going to lie, it’s the business part of it. That’s what we live in. When you have two goalies that are so close and it comes to stats, there’s got to be some changes. There’s a personal side to it and there’s a business side to it. You’ve got to honor it. That’s just how being a professional hockey player is.- Linus Ullmark, Bruins goalie
Naturally, after the Stanley Cup is handed out, league GMs begin crunching numbers and yanking their hair out. We’ve heard it every offseason, the NHL is a copycat league. The champion Golden Knights are the newest club in line to be mimicked by desperate front offices.
First and foremost, the Stanley Cup winners debunked one of the league’s biggest playoff myths. The Golden Knights became league champs with a low-salary goalie tandem. In years past, even Vegas believed in paying goalies above market prices. Remember the $12M in goal the Golden Knights’ front office allocated in 2020-21? Well, they clearly learned from that unnecessary investment. Other teams noticed as well.
One of the unfortunate realities of the NHL landscape we currently live in is that the salary cap plays an important role in every hockey decision made by every team. That ramps up significantly when a team is try to contend, as the Golden Knights have been for the past five seasons and into their sixth.
Due to the pandemic, the salary cap has stayed stagnant for a few years now and is expected to do so for the next few to come. So, when a team pushes up close to the cap, it turns into a Newton’s Law type situation for them. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.
The Golden Knights want to add Alex Pietrangelo, they need to subtract Nate Schmidt and Paul Stastny. They want to add Jack Eichel, Max Pacioretty and Evgenii Dadonov must go. Truthfully, it’s not that simple, but until the cap rises dramatically from one year to the next, it’s an easy way to view things that isn’t all that far off from reality.
Luckily, the dramatic rise in the salary cap may be coming a bit sooner than previously expected when the league came back from the pandemic in late 2020.
I’ve seen some preliminary estimates recently which would make me more optimistic on the cap going up sooner whether that’s in two seasons or three seasons, I think it’s more likely than not two seasons rather than three. –Bill Daly, NHL Deputy Commissioner on 32 Thoughts Podcast
This is huge news for the Golden Knights because when the cap does inevitably go up, it’s expected to push into the ninth digit. Yeah, Bill Daly, the NHL’s 2nd in command, is optimistic the $82.5 million salary cap will rise to close to or even exceed $100 million by mid-2024.
The Golden Knights have 13 players under contract for the 2024-25 season. They make a total of $68 million. These players are the big three, Jack Eichel, Mark Stone, and Alex Pietrangelo, as well as William Karlsson, Reilly Smith, Nic Roy, Keegan Kolesar, Shea Theodore, Brayden McNabb, Zach Whitecloud, Robin Lehner, Logan Thompson, and Shea Weber.
Of course, Weber’s salary will be buried in LTIR, meaning the Golden Knights will have a 12-man roster worth about $60 million, leaving them with nearly 40% of the salary cap to fill out the remaining eight to 11 spots. To contrast, the combination of just the six of Eichel, Stone, Pietrangelo, Karlsson, Theodore, and Alec Martinez currently takes up about 52% of the cap this season.
Vegas will have decisions to make on players like Jonathan Marchessault, Chandler Stephenson, William Carrier, Brett Howden, and Martinez between now and then, but the added cap space should alleviate a lot of the struggle they’ve been dealing with these past few seasons.
The sooner the cap goes up, the easier life will become on the Golden Knights. As long as the league’s revenues continue trending in the same direction, it appears that may come for the 24-25 season as opposed to the expected 25-26 year.
It’s complicated. Very complicated. And when all is said and done, it’s going to remain complicated, even if the Golden Knights win the Stanley Cup. As you read through this, and experience the rest of the Golden Knights’ 5th attempt to win the NHL’s greatest prize, remember that you don’t have to pick a side. You are allowed to have complex feelings about the entire situation. You can celebrate the great moments while also feeling a little dirty about them as well.
Ok, got it? Now, let’s get to talking about it.
On November 4th, the Golden Knights made the bold move of acquiring superstar Jack Eichel. The move was widely celebrated as a giant win for a team that has continued to throw caution to the wind and never stop going full steam ahead in their quest to win the Cup.
But, the rules didn’t, and still don’t, allow Vegas to bring Eichel onto this already strong team without other events taking place. When the Golden Knights added Eichel, their roster sat more than $10 million above the salary cap’s upper limit. Meaning, even though the Golden Knights now have Eichel on their team, he isn’t allowed to hit the ice until subsequent moves are made to satisfy the league’s salary requirements.
Most assumed they’d trade a few players away, but always lurking in the background was this idea taking advantage of the NHL’s convoluted long-term injured reserve rules. A year after the Tampa Bay Lightning hoisted the Cup with a roster $18 million north of the salary cap, the option always seemed a possibility for Vegas as well.
However, it’s not that easy. For it to work, a player has to be injured for the remainder of the regular season and then be healthy enough to play right when the playoffs begin. It would take a stroke of perfectly timed luck that would make hitting the PowerBall seem like a piece of cake. Or… it would take some slightly sinister, slightly shady, slightly unsportsmanlike behavior from a small group of people to caress a tricky situation into the perfect storm.
This brings us to the situation that may be unfolding currently for the Golden Knights. Eichel appears ready to return to action fairly soon, Alec Martinez as well, and that $10 million cap question must be answered, possibly as soon as Wednesday. And, voila, despite playing in the All Star Game and shooting pucks on the Bellagio Fountain just days before, Mark Stone is scratched moments before the second night of a back-to-back in Calgary, and league sources are speculating that he might be the solution to Vegas’ $10 million problem. Stone would take Eichel’s place on LTIR, sit out for the rest of the season, and rejoin the Golden Knights in the playoffs when there is no longer a salary cap.
If that is indeed the case, here’s the timeline we’re looking at.
October 14th, Stone leaves a game against the Kings with what appears to be a serious injury. Five days later, Pete DeBoer says he avoided surgery and is “somewhere between day-to-day and week-to-week.” Less than a month after the injury that was later confirmed by The Athletic’s Pierre LeBrun to be in his back, Stone returned to practice. 30 days after the injury, Stone played in a game at T-Mobile Arena.
Following that game, he said this.
With the medical staff, myself, the physical training staff we’ve done a good job getting it solved, getting my body into a position to feel comfortable on the ice, which I hadn’t for maybe a while and I kind of fooled myself into thinking I felt great… I feel good going forward that I’m going to get through the season and I feel as strong as ever. -Stone
36 days and 16 consecutive game appearances later, on December 19th, Stone was scratched from a game against the Islanders. He played in the next game on the 21st, but for just 11 shifts and 7:47, his lowest output of the season. This time it was described that he “tweaked something” and it “wasn’t worth pushing it with him with the (Christmas) break coming up.”
He went on to miss the next four games while participating in practice off-and-on sometimes wearing a no-contact jersey. He’d return to play on January 6th and play four straight games before being placed in COVID protocols. That forced Stone out of a pair of games before he returned to action on January 25th. He played all four games, competed in the All Star Game and Skills Competition before being ruled out yesterday.
One thing is very clear, Mark Stone has been battling through an injury. There’s nothing made up or contrived about it.
But the timing Stone going from a nagging injury that never kept him out for more than a few weeks to requiring exactly an 11-week stint on LTIR at nearly the exact moment Eichel is ready to return seems awfully convenient.
Note: It has not been confirmed at this time that Stone is headed for LTIR or is out for the season. Nor has it even been confirmed that he will miss the next game. But when a veteran reporter like Frank Seravalli speculates that it could be coming, we have to consider it a strong possibility.
So, enough with facts, let’s get into the theoretical and philosophical aspects of it all.
If it’s all legitimate, which it very well may be, the sheer luck of the timing would have to be absolutely astounding.
It hadn’t happened in 11 years, and it probably won’t happen for 11 more. The Golden Knights’ decision to only dress 15 skaters on Monday night in a critical game against the Colorado Avalanche was a bit of a shock. General Manager Kelly McCrimmon explained the situation and pointed towards unexpected injuries to several players at the same time. This left the organization without enough cap space to call up a player in time for Monday’s game. However, the explanation didn’t sit well with some in the hockey world.
Immediately after McCrimmon’s last minute Zoom conference, TSN’s Frank Seravalli challenged Vegas’ reasoning.
