Merriam-Webster define “accrual” as “to accumulate or be added periodically.” They don’t define “cap space” as “how much money GM Patrik Allvin has on hand with which to improve upon the Vancouver Canucks.” But, for our purposes, perhaps they should.

After all, that’s what the cap space accrual game is really all about. And since it’s something the Canucks haven’t experienced in quite some time, it probably bears a more in-depth explanation.

This is that in-depth explanation.

Finally, we can dispense with the roster projections. We have the actual NHL opening day rosters now, as of October 7, and the Canucks’ looks like this:

More importantly, for our purposes, the Canucks’ opening day financial situation looks like this, as per our friends over at PuckPedia:

For the first time in working memory, the Canucks will start the 2024/25 season under the cap ceiling. Not “technically over the cap, but able to get buy thanks to LTIR relief space.” But actually, genuinely under the $88 million cap for 2024/25, and by the current count of $479,166.

(We, for the record, projected they’d be $479,175 under the cap. So close; damn you, rounding errors!)

Even more impressive, the Canucks have accomplished this feat with both Thatcher Demko and Dakota Joshua expected to spend the bulk of the first month of the season on IR. And “IR,” as opposed to “LTIR,” means the Canucks are carrying Demko and Joshua’s full cap hits…and still sailing in under the cap ceiling.

So what do they get for this accomplishment? They get to accrue cap space. But what does that mean?

The first thing to come to terms with here is that the ways in which we discuss the salary cap and the numbers we typically use to do so are largely illusory, and that’s a result of applying year-long terms to something that is actually counted daily.

The salary cap is still at $88 million. But that number represents the total amount that teams can spend throughout the entirety of the 2024/25 regular season. Team cap hits themselves, however, are tabulated on a daily basis. With the 2024/25 season scheduled to last 192 days, that means that teams can spend up to $458,333 a day on cap hits.

Those cap hits are tabulated daily, too, and using the same basic formula. A player’s total cap hit, divided by 192, results in their daily cap hit. For Quinn Hughes and his $7.85 million AAV will cost the Canucks approximately $40,886.42 for each day he is on the roster.

None of which really matters all that much in the practical sense, other than being the numbers we’ll need to plug into various formulas to give us the more valuable information, that being how much cap space this current $479,166 might turn into.

Because the cap is tabulated daily, so too is the amount of cap saved. Right now, the Canucks’ $479,166 gap between them and the cap ceiling will result in $2,495.66 of cap accrual each day. That doesn’t sound like a lot, because it isn’t. But put that daily amount together with the knowledge that NHL cap hits are also counted daily, and it starts to matter.

How accruing space actually works is this: a team only needs to fit what’s left of a player’s salary on their cap books. If there are 100 days left in the season, the amount left to pay that player comes down to a formula of Total Cap Hit/(192 x 100).

So, the longer a team can accrue cap space for, the more they have, and the longer into the season they wait to add new players to the roster, the less cap space they actually need to add said player. Those two factors can combine into a real windfall of effective spending room by the time of the annual Trade Deadline.

We realize this is all a little overly complicated. Which is why, typically, you’ll hear folks skip over all the math and just use a team’s projected cap hit to discuss future cap accrual. In reality, with transactions potentially happening daily, the amount a team accrues can also change on a daily basis. It’s a lot more practical to use an estimate, compiled by a team’s expected amount of daily accrual and then inversed with the percentage of player contracts that will still be payable as of the Trade Deadline, to project how much extra teams will be able to spend at that point.

For the Canucks right now, that total is approximately $2.2 million. What that means is, should the Canucks be able to maintain their gap of $479,166 under the cap ceiling from now until the Trade Deadline (and on every day in between), they’d be able to add a player to their roster with an annual cap hit of up to $2.2 million – without going over the cap.

Now, that number won’t actually come to pass. The Canucks will suffer injuries, they will call players up, they will send players down. Each transaction affects the daily cap, and thus the amount of daily accrual, and each miniscule change affects that practical spending space down the road.

But this should mostly work in the Canucks favour.

Right now, the Canucks have that $479,166 gap with 23 healthy players on the roster and both Demko and Joshua on IR. That means the Canucks can accommodate their two current injuries, and up to three more, before they truly need to recall anyone from Abbotsford (not that they can afford to, anyway, with just $479,166 in room, far less than a minimum contract.)

Thus, they can feel pretty confident in maintaining at least that much of a gap for the majority of the 2024/25 campaign.

But there should also be days in which the Canucks are accruing more cap space. Let’s imagine, for the sake of hypotheticals, that a miracle occurs and Joshua is suddenly deemed healthy for Wednesday’s season opener against the Flames. To fit Joshua on the active roster, Aatu Räty might need to be sent down to Abbotsford, removing his $836,667 from the roster.

Now, the Canucks would be $1,315,833 under the cap, an amount that would accrue to more than $6 million in effective spending space if maintained until the Trade Deadline.

As we’ve outlined here, those numbers change daily, and actually projecting what the Canucks might end up with by March is an impossibility. But rough estimates are possible, and they say that Allvin and Co. should have room to go shopping around the 2025 Trade Deadline. How much space remains to be seen, but the number does appear to be very likely to be counted in the millions. Throw salary retention into the mix, and there might not be many players out there the Canucks can’t afford come Deadline 2025 – so long as they can find the assets to trade in return for said player.