James Mirtle dropped a cap bombshell Wednesday morning, and it has front offices around the NHL recalculating their long-term math.
The league has only projected its salary cap out through the 2027-28 season. That alone tells you something about how fast this number has been moving.
But according to Mirtle's reporting for The Athletic, that's not the real story. Executives and player agents he's spoken with over the past few months are pointing to something bigger.
Hockey-related revenue is being tracked in a completely different way than it was before the pandemic. And that shift, sources tell Mirtle, points to the cap's upper limit spiking hard in the summer of 2028.
Think about what that means for a roster like the Edmonton Oilers, already paying Leon Draisaitl a league-high $14,000,000 cap hit. A jump like this doesn't just add breathing room. It rewrites what "expensive" even looks like.
Connor McDavid sits right behind him at $12,500,000. Contracts signed today were built around cap numbers that might look conservative in two years.
That's the tension nobody's talking about publicly yet.
Agents are already positioning for the 2028 cap spike
Every negotiation happening right now, extensions, bridge deals, term sheets, is being shaped by numbers that could be outdated before the ink dries.
Agents know it. GMs know it. And that's exactly why term length has become such a fight at the table this offseason.
A team locking a core piece into a long-term deal at today's cap number could look brilliant in hindsight. Or it could look like it left millions on the table.
Is a bigger cap ceiling good news for the league? Depends who you ask. Big-market spenders love it. Budget teams trying to keep pace? Not so much.
Mirtle's sourcing doesn't give an exact number for where the ceiling lands in 2028. Nobody's putting a hard figure on it yet, not publicly anyway.
But the direction of the conversation has shifted. This isn't a small annual bump anymore. It's a structural reset tied to how the league actually counts its money now.
-
Front offices building their books past 2028 are flying without a map right now. And that uncertainty is going to shape decisions made this summer, whether teams admit it or not.
Should the NHL lock in cap projections further out to give teams more certainty?
Also read on Markerzone.com:
Another tragedy hits the Gaudreau family just weeks before heartbreaking anniversary
