Cap space is normally pretty tough to come by. NHL teams have to retain on contracts, ferry prospects back and forth between the AHL – as we’ve seen the Vancouver Canucks do countless times this season – and pull all sorts of other tricks in order to spend as little and save as much as possible.

The only real time that cap space comes easy is when the league and player’s association agree to raise the salary cap itself. Fortunately, now that the Flat Cap Era is officially over, those cap increases have been coming fast and furious.

Except with recent reports around this coming offseason, we may just be in 2Fast 2Furious territory.

This next jump might just be an enormously big one.

According to Sportsnet’s Elliotte Friedman, speaking last night during the HNIC broadcast, negotiations are currently underway between the NHL and NHLPA on what the cap might be for the 2025/26 season.

Those talks will likely continue throughout much of the regular season. But Friedman has an inkling as to how those negotiations are going, and they’re decidedly in the direction of a sudden and massive rise.

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the cap ceiling used to increase by an average of about $2.5 million per season, getting up to $81.5 million as of the 2019/20 season. The loss of revenue brought on by the pandemic necessitated a flattening of those increases thereafter, and so the cap stayed at $81.5 million for the next two seasons running, before limping up to $82.5 million for 2022/23 and $83.5 million for 2023/24.

Then the revenue caught up, the escrow was paid off, and the cap jumped all the way up to $88 million this past offseason, a jump of $4.5 million.

Now, with revenue doing pretty darn well these days, another big jump was expected for the 2025 offseason. But there are usually maximums to these things. According to Friedman’s reporting, the CBA states that the most the cap could climb to for 2025/25 is $92.4 million, a jump of $4.4 million.

But the NHL and NHLPA can change that through negotiations if they want to. And according to Friedman, that’s exactly what they’re doing. He claims that, with revenue through the roof, the cap could rise to as high as somewhere between $95 and 97 million, which would be a rise of either $7 or 9 million.

That’s a lot of money for any franchise, but especially one like the Canucks, who always spend as close to the cap as functionally possible.

As we mentioned, those negotiations will remain ongoing. But if it’s getting reported live on the air during the biggest broadcast of the hockey week, one has to imagine that the possibility is strong. Strong enough, anyway, that we can begin speculating about what this might mean for the Canucks and GM Patrik Allvin.

Mostly good things, of course.

The majority of the Canucks’ roster is locked up through next season already, and that’s especially true of their core players. The only players with contracts that expire into unrestricted free agents (UFAs) this upcoming offseason are Brock Boeser, Pius Suter, Derek Forbort, Kevin Lankinen, and Noah Juulsen. The only restricted free agents (RFAs) of note that need new deals are Aatu Räty, Erik Brännström, and Arshdeep Bains.

Nils Höglander already negotiated a raise of $2 million that kicks in next year.

And, of course, the Canucks also have another ‘raise’ to worry about in the form of an increase to Oliver Ekman-Larsson’s buyout penalty. It will go up from the $2,346,667 it is set at for this season to $4,766,667 for each of the next two seasons.

At the same time, Tucker Poolman’s $500,000 of retention comes off the books, effectively reducing the dead cap increase to a little under $2 million.

Either way, a cap ceiling increase of between $7-9 million could absolutely cover that extra $4 million-plus reasonable raises for the likes of Boeser, Räty, and Brännström, along with re-signings or replacements for the rest of that crew. More so on the $9 million side than the $7 million side, but either way it could work.

In other words, so long as this reported increase does come through somewhere in the range that Friedman has reported, the Canucks won’t have to worry about cutting any talent loose this offseason. They should be able to return a roster that, at the very least, has not been downgraded from 2024/25 to 2025/26.

But avoiding a downgrade isn’t the same as an upgrade.

This season, the Canucks are going to be able to add to their roster eventually through the power of cap accrual and daily accounting. But to keep whoever they add beyond this year will obviously take up some of that reported cap increase. And then, if the Canucks don’t add someone in-season who’s sticking around, adding someone in the offseason – where accrual doesn’t exist – might prove even trickier.

Here, one really has to start counting cash. Of the potential $7 million in extra cap that might be coming this offseason, there’s $2 million going to dead cap automatically and at least $2 million in raises that can be expected to be handed out. That leaves just $3 million. Suppose the team were to cut loose, say, Forbort and hope to replace him with a higher-profile defender. That’s leaving them with just about $4.5 million (Forbort’s $1.5 million AAV+ the $3 million), which isn’t exactly the salary of a top-tier defender, especially if that defender’s coming from the UFA market.

An increase of $9 million makes it easier, of course. But not all that much easier.

In fact, speaking of that UFA market, here’s where the cap increase could actually work against the Canucks. We’ve already written about it being a bit of a seller’s market for blueliners over the next couple of years, with very few quality defenders set to reach UFA status.

Suppose the cap ceiling does rise by $7-9 million this offseason. In that case, the combination of that and a limited pool of available UFA defenders will no doubt conspire to raise some of the contracts handed out to preposterous heights. It’s basic supply and demand at that point – a suddenly ample supply of cap space and a dwindling supply of defenders against a constant demand for better defence.

What that really tells us is that, major cap increase or not, the Canucks probably still won’t have the room to do any major shopping in the 2025 UFA market. Not in this economy. They’d be much better served attempting to fit someone in with their cap accrual during the 2024/25 season who either has term left on their contract or who can be negotiated with well ahead of the free agent frenzy.

In other words, yes, the reportedly gargantuan increase that may be coming to the league salary cap is good news for the Canucks, but it’s also good news for essentially every other franchise in the NHL, which prevents it from being outright great news for the Canucks.

They can be glad that so many of their most important contracts are already on the books before the salaries start to jump along with the cap. However, significantly adding to this team from here on out remains a difficult challenge to negotiate, and there are certainly no automatic solutions headed our way.