After the NHL’s new CBA introduced salary cap requirements for the playoffs, league developers and its Central Registry staff added a new feature to the SAP Front Office App to help club executives remain compliant.
At least four Stanley Cup champions in the past dozen years benefitted from prior rules in which clubs received salary cap relief when a player was on the long-term injured reserve (LTIR) — if that player returned in the playoffs, the team could remain over the cap without penalty.
Beginning with the 2025-26 season, however, all NHL teams have to remain compliant even in the postseason. The new Playoff Cap Roster Planner was made available prior to the Olympics break in the schedule so executives could map out several different trade deadline scenarios.
“There was some concern and consternation by a number of clubs that they didn’t think that the non-application of the salary cap during the playoffs was fair, particularly when players were coming off of long-term injury and then were able to play,” NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman told SBJ.
Of the new Playoff Cap Roster Planner, Bettman added, “First of all, it ensures that the information is accurate and up to date. Secondly, it’s a competitive issue. It ensures that our clubs are compliant for all of their playoff games. The mechanics of doing what we all knew had to be done was as important as the substance. Central Registry and SAP, I think, did an unbelievable job of coming up with an app that enabled all of the clubs to do it in real time no matter where they were.”
Chris Foster, NHL VP of digital business development, said SAP Front Office App usage increased by a factor of 16 prior to the deadline, with 30 of the 32 teams considered “super-users” of the tool. He noted that clubs always kept careful tabs of their own payroll, of course, but finding trade partners was complicated by unverified salary data of everyone else.
“The gap was having all of the data built out for all 31 other clubs,” Foster said. “That’s where the manual work really comes, and the burden was on the clubs to build that out, modeling across the league. Now you’ve got to start thinking about your trade partners because for each move to be cap-compliant, it has to work on both sides.”
SAP has been a technology partner of the NHL for years, collaborating on the Front Office App, the upgraded stats section of the league website, the Coaching Insights app available on the bench iPads and the Venue Metrics sustainability app. The technological backbone for all of this is SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP), which Foster described as the “foundational tool set to innovate quickly.”
Daniel Beringer, SAP’s global head of technology for global sponsorships, praised the NHL as being a highly innovative partner that invests serious time and money on mission-critical systems. The goal of SAP BTP is to provide a balance of rapidly evolving software that is also adaptable to client needs. The cap planner and entire Front Office App are both available on mobile phones as well as tablets, but of team general managers, Beringer said, “The iPad is the very core of their professional existence.”