Training camps are already underway in junior leagues. NHL rookie and main camps are mere weeks away. And the first preseason game is just 24 days away, with the Blues traveling to Dallas to face their old friends the Stars.
Depending on where you are, it’s also starting to feel like fall as we get set for the start of September this weekend, which obviously means two things: (a) it’s back to school and (b) it’s hockey season.
This will be the last of three national summer mailbags I’ve pulled together; click here for editions one and two. Definitely appreciate all the great questions and the response in the comments. We’ll do our best to have more of these throughout the 2025-26 season.
On today’s agenda are questions about the Oilers and their goalies, the good ol’ no-tax state debate, why teams have so much cap room, and pain in Toronto and Buffalo.
(Note: Questions have been lightly edited for clarity and length.)
What’s the more painful reality for fans? The Leafs never making the Eastern Conference final or the Sabres not sniffing the playoffs — both until the 2030s at the soonest? Standing in the way of Toronto: a fierce division full of dynastic Florida teams and rising Canadian teams. Standing in the way of the Sabres: *gestures vaguely at Kevyn Adams and Terry Pegula* — Jeff G.
The three longest Stanley Cup droughts in NHL history are all active right now, and the Leafs are (unsurprisingly) first at 57 years and counting. The Sabres and Canucks are right behind, having never won since entering the league in 1970 (54-year droughts).
So the current “painful reality” has that historical pain as part of the backdrop.
This isn’t an easy question, but I’m going to say Buffalo is in the more painful position right now. Isn’t it better to have loved (a decent team) and lost (a lot of playoff series) than to have sat mired at the bottom due to incompetence year after year? There have been some good times and moments for Toronto, especially early on with their star core. They had some hope that things might turn their way.
And it still might. The Leafs had the fourth-best record in the league last season. Yes, they lost one of their Core Four players, and yes, they still have to deal with the Panthers in their division, but they’re a million miles closer to a Cup right now than the Sabres. Maybe that falls apart in the years to come, as their roster ages out of contention, but the dream isn’t dead.
But when a fan’s primary goal for a season is for an owner and management team to move on, that’s grim business. Buffalo does have some intriguing young pieces there, so maybe at some point they can get a new architect in there to retool around that talent.
Perhaps things even look brighter for them than for Toronto at some point. We’re definitely not there yet, however.
Will the Oilers upgrade their current goalie duo of Stuart Skinner and Calvin Pickard? (Bruce Bennett / Getty Images)
Do you see any legitimate goalie trade targets for Edmonton between now and the trade deadline? — Jonathan S.
Have to be honest, I thought when I started researching this question there would be more options than there are.
It’s pretty thin out there in NHL creases. A lot of teams are going with pretty inexperienced options in the backup role, so it’s hard to see them moving a starter. And there really aren’t a lot of teams with two veterans you could consider potential No. 1s, which would be what Edmonton would want in an upgrade over their current duo of Stuart Skinner and Calvin Pickard.
The perfect option for the Oilers would be a team that had designs on having a better season, struggling out of the gate and starting to shed talent aggressively, the way the Bruins did last season. But who is that team?
Detroit, I guess, could move off of either John Gibson or Cam Talbot if they struggle, with top prospect Sebastian Cossa on the way. But it really feels like the Red Wings will be in a playoff race late in the season, with some of their young players taking the next step. The Islanders and Mammoth potentially have extra goalies, assuming improved health for Semyon Varlamov and Connor Ingram, but do either of them offer an upgrade to Edmonton? Vancouver has a lot of dough committed to their tandem, but they just signed them and gave both Thatcher Demko and Kevin Lankinen no-movement clauses. Then there’s Anaheim with Petr Mrazek as the backup?
Pittsburgh and Columbus could trade their “starters” (Tristan Jarry and Elvis Merzlikins), but given their massive struggles, you again wonder if there’s any tangible improvement there.
We’re really reaching to even contemplate some of these options for a team with designs on winning a championship, so it feels like it’ll take something a bit unexpected for the Oilers to find what they’re looking for in the crease, with either a team we think is going to be good falling out of the mix early on and getting creative, or Edmonton getting desperate enough that they offer up prime assets to pull a more valuable goalie out of a two-goalie tandem team such as Carolina, New Jersey, St. Louis, Toronto or Washington.
Otherwise, the Oilers may well be left crossing their fingers and going with Skinner and Pickard again in the postseason, which is a tough look in such a pivotal season.
How come the NFL, MLB and NBA never complain about no-tax states? — Dan N.
A huge part of this comes down to winning, in my opinion. By my count, only the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in the NFL and the Houston Astros and Texas Rangers in MLB have won titles in markets without state taxes in the past decade.
In contrast, the NHL has had five of its last six winners come from either Florida or Nevada, with three non-traditional markets (Tampa, Las Vegas and South Florida) dominating the league.
That’s going to get people talking.
But the other thing is the NHL has (a) more high-profile teams in high-tax environments such as Canada, (b) a hard cap that has been held flat for half a decade and (c) margins on salaries that are far smaller overall. Hockey’s stars aren’t clearing $60 million-plus a season the way Dak Prescott and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander are, so those extra percentage points matter, even if the talk of how much of a factor they are is often overblown.
The NHL is unique, too, in that there isn’t much movement of star players, with a lot of them simply opting to stay where they are, often at a discount from the open market. When the warm-weather teams are winning a lot, that creates the appearance that stars are flocking to those markets, when the reality is few of them actually landed there in free agency. (The Panthers, for example, are not a team built through July 1, with Sergei Bobrovsky the only star acquired that way.)
Some of this is also created by the way NHL contracts are talked about in the media. With the cap so tight and so many decisions being made solely to make the dollars and cents work, all of a sudden every trade and every signing gets viewed through a player-agent lens via the media. And that’s when you get into the minutiae of why a player signed here or there, including factors such as taxation.
That said, I’ve had plenty of agents say the no-tax state factor is being talked about too much, as most of their clients really want to go to places they feel they can win. And I’m sorry to say, but that hasn’t really been the case for most of the Canadian teams or those in the New York metro or California over the past decade.
This ranking might well have more to do with that than the tax factor, too.
I’m a bit confused why, on the one hand, “cap space is king!” but on the other, some teams will trade for a “dead contract.” There’s talk of Carey Price’s contract being of interest to some teams; Shea Weber’s deal is still “active” and the Blackhawks have it, but other teams like Vegas, Tampa, Florida and the Leafs use LTIR to “fit” all of their contracts under the cap. I also believe that as the season progresses, you can “accrue” cap space, but only if you have cap space in the first place. What, in your opinion, makes more sense: trading for dead contracts or having cap space? — Chad F.
It is confusing, for sure. The answer to your question is “It depends on your situation.” In general, teams do not want to be in LTIR. You can’t accrue cap space, and any performance bonuses that are attained get pushed into the following season.
But if you’re a rebuilding team with plenty of cap room, or you need to get to the cap floor, taking on an LTIR contract can pay off in obtaining an asset basically for free. Or if you’re a contending team that wants to add salary at the deadline and you have an injured player who can create some room, you use it that way.
The Weber contract is a good one to look at to make sense of this. He was on that deal with Montreal as recently as the summer of 2022, then was punted to Vegas, Arizona/Utah and finally now Chicago over the next three years.
The Golden Knights took on his contract initially in order to free up cap room by dumping Evgenii Dadonov’s $5 million deal to the Habs, who were more concerned about not being deeply into LTIR down the line (with Carey Price’s situation further complicating their cap math). The low-spending Coyotes took Weber’s deal from Vegas eight months later to get a fifth-round pick. Then, when Utah wanted to spend to the cap, they sent it to Chicago with a couple of prospects and the Blackhawks can use it to hit the floor.
There’s not much actual money left on Weber’s deal, given the unique way it is structured, so it’s just a matter of who can take on the hot potato of a big cap hit or LTIR charge. And as teams’ circumstances have changed, they punt him to another team that can take that burden on.
So, in some situations, trading for dead contracts to get an asset and get to the floor makes plenty of sense. In other situations, however, you want to get out of LTIR, accrue cap space and ensure your bonuses aren’t being charged to the following season.
This weird cap math may change under the new CBA when it kicks in for 2026-27, as accruing space will be far less useful given there will be a playoff salary cap. But that’s probably worth a longer explanation at some point on its own.
A couple more cap-related ones here to close us out …
A lot of teams have cap room, which means players are not earning as much as they could. Is this due to the league not adjusting to the new cap limit? Or could it have to do with no-trade clauses being so abundant that teams such as the Jets, Blue Jackets, Blackhawks, Ducks, Sharks, Flames and Sabres cannot get anyone to accept a trade and open up space for either the trading team or increase the team’s salary for the traded-to team? — Gary M.
We’ve already seen that some of the better teams are able to keep players that historically they haven’t been able to, but do you think that this trend can continue over the course of the next CBA, given how much the cap is rising (and likely will continue to)? How do you think this will or will not hurt teams at the bottom half compared to the top half? Can it keep some teams afloat longer, as well as keep some teams at the bottom in terms of getting talent in? — Agilmour
I think the thing to keep in mind is that we’re in a transitional period right now. Part of why teams have this extra cap space entering September is that few quality free agents made it to free agency, so there wasn’t a ton for them to spend that new money on back on July 1.
That’s going to change in the years to come, as any players who become RFAs or UFAs are going to command bigger salaries and start shifting the cap calculations around the NHL. More players are going to make it to the bidding wars, in my opinion. But it’s going to take time for that new normal to settle in.
But you’re absolutely right that no-trade clauses don’t help. So many of those star players I talked about in the question about no-state taxes above are also getting full no-movement clauses as part of their new deals. It’s not uncommon right now to see teams with seven, eight or more players with some kind of trade limiter on their contracts, and those are typically all of the best players on a team.
When even David Kämpf is getting a lot of trade protection, you know the system is going a bit wonky.
I wonder if, at some point, the league is going to have to limit the number of NTCs and NMCs that teams are able to give out. That wasn’t something included in this new CBA, so it’s not happening until at least 2030-31, but I could see it being something the league might want.
If you factor in the way the new playoff salary cap is going to work, it’s going to become much harder to make in-season moves than ever by 2026-27. The new CBA limits the effectiveness of both salary retention and cap space accrual, two things that allowed teams to get creative at the deadline and add more salary. Mix in every star player having trade protection, and it’s a recipe for very limited movement, even with the cap going up the way it is projected to.
To answer Agilmour’s related question: I think there are going to be some teams at the bottom that are going to be able to start spending their way up the standings, if that makes sense. With the cap rising so aggressively, and more money piling in each year, you’re going to have the big-market teams that are rebuilding — such as Chicago, Detroit and Philadelphia — able to throw massive dollars at UFAs.
At some point, the Sam Bennetts of this past summer are going to take that money instead of leaving so much on the table to stay where they are. The math is just going to become too enticing — and it’s not like those are bad places to play. As much as you might like a warm-weather team, are you really going to turn down 40-50 percent more money in one of those big markets that may be on the rise in another two or three years?
We’ll see if that all pays off in more upward mobility for the NHL’s “lower-class” clubs that have had a hard time winning the past few years. As I wrote in last week’s Red Light newsletter, there’s been very little movement among the top 10 and bottom 10 teams over the past five years, and this coming season isn’t exactly shaping up to dramatically change that.
No one wants to watch a stagnant league year after year, where the same teams are always good and bad, so some things getting shaken up with the higher cap figure would be nice. I suspect it’ll become a much bigger factor as the cap crests past the $110 million mark in 2027-28, pricing some teams out of spending to the very limit the way they’ve been able to in the flat-cap era.
Yes, increased revenue sharing will help smaller markets keep up to some extent, but there’ll be a limitation to how well that controls spending. It’ll be interesting to watch how much longer the established powers in places such as Florida, Dallas, Vegas, Colorado, Edmonton and Tampa are able to hold onto their stars and keep winning games.
At some point, the fact that they’ve been mortgaging their futures through draft picks and prospect trades for years is going to catch up with them. And there will be a new wave of successful teams, potentially led by the Montreals and Utah of the league.
Thanks again for reading — bit of a dense bag with all of that CBA and salary cap talk, but hey, it is the offseason. If you have more related questions, feel free to leave them in the comments or our next mailbag callout, and I’ll try to address as many as I can.
(Top photo: Steve Russell / Toronto Star via Getty Images)