The wild and woolly 2026 NHL offseason is nowhere near done yet. But it does seem to have reached a bit of a lull as the league awaits the results and consequences of the Leo Carlsson offer sheet, and that makes for as good a time as any to check in on the Vancouver Canucks’ cap situation following a few trades and some free agent signings.

In short, the Canucks have plenty of cap space. An abundance of it, in fact. The detailed records don’t go all the way back, but this author would hazard a guess that this is the most cap space the Canucks have had available at any point since the salary cap came into effect.

For now, it’s a hair under $18 million in space. We’ll get to how we got to that number, and what it means, in a minute. But for now, let’s just appreciate that number. For a team that, at times, has had about $180 in available spending space, it’s a truly astronomical amount.

It’s also a pretty sharp turnaround. As bad as the 2025-26 Canucks were, they were also technically over the salary cap on a couple of occasions, which resulted in them having to put players like Derek Forbort and Thatcher Demko on long-term injured reserve at various points in the season.
Suffice it to say that the 2026-27 are probably not going to have to do that.

Folks like Quinn Hughes, Kiefer Sherwood, Tyler Myers, and Conor Garland departed within the 2025-26 season itself. And from the post-deadline roster, the Canucks now have Marcus Pettersson ($5.5 million), Evander Kane ($5.125 million), Nils Höglander ($3 million), Teddy Blueger ($1.8 million), Pierre-Olivier Joseph ($775,000), Curtis Douglas ($775,000), and Derek Forbort ($2 million) fully off the books.

The only significant salaries replacing any of those players belong to Jamie Oleksiak ($5 million), Brendan Gallagher ($3.25 million), Luke Schenn ($2.25 million), and Paul Cotter ($2.15 million).

It’s far less money coming in than going out. Any other roster replacements at this point will likely come from within, and feature cap hits in the sub-$1 million range. And then never mind that the cap ceiling itself is going up considerably, all the way to $104 million. It’s not hard to see where all the extra space has come from.

To get some exact numbers, we have to put a roster together, and we’re going to borrow some of our work from a recent attempt at an updated depth chart. We’ll use this sample 23-player roster:

It’s not a perfect roster, and it’s not set in stone. The Canucks might choose to roll with eight defenders on the roster instead of 14 forwards, and then maybe you add someone like Kirill Kudryavtsev to the mix. Perhaps the Canucks go with three goalies and keep Nikita Tolopilo. Maybe Braeden Cootes beats out newcomer Ilya Safonov for that centre job.

And of course, there’s the possibility of further transactions, and the inevitability of injuries.

But it’s good enough to give us a start here.

This is a 23-player roster.

Were the Canucks to go into the 2026-27 with this exact roster, they’d project to have an annual cap hit of $86,143,334. That would be a full $17,856,666 under the cap ceiling of $104,000,000.

That, again, is more cap space than we can remember the Canucks having at any point in a season in working memory, never mind at the outset of a season.

But the cap space doesn’t stop there.

You may recall that unspent cap space effectively ‘accrues’ over a season, combining with the daily pay and eventual pro-rated nature of NHL contracts to grow to occasionally preposterous proportions. The Canucks are now officially in that preposterous territory. Were they to maintain this $17.9ish million in cap space throughout the entire 2026-27 season, then by the 2027 Trade Deadline, they’d be able to add annual cap hits totalling some $83,243,333.

That’s an almost nonsensical number. It’s more money than the Canucks could possibly spend, or want to spend, within the season. But it’s a pretty much unlimited amount when it comes to the Canucks being able to weaponize it in-season via cap dumps and salary retention and things like that.

There’s been some consternation in the fanbase about the cap floor, which is pretty strange to hear in this market. As it stands, the floor for 2026-27 is set at $76.9 million. Even in this currently trimmed-down state, the Canucks are almost $10 million above that.

Even if Jake DeBrusk were to be traded and replaced on the roster with someone making the league minimum, they still wouldn’t come close to worrying about the floor. It would take the Canucks somehow removing Elias Pettersson’s entire cap hit from the books without adding any replacement salary for them to truly go below the floor, and the odds of that happening are pretty darn slim.

Beyond accrual, cap dumping, and retention, there are a ton of other, smaller benefits the Canucks will enjoy from being well under the cap. Last season, they had a bit of trouble accommodating short-term injuries and the call-ups to replace them. That’s why they eventually had to place players on LTIR. That won’t be the case at all in 2026-27. With $17 million in cap space, the Canucks can call up and send down their waiver-exempt prospects as much as they see fit. They’ll have room to put half their roster on regular IR and still have room to call up replacements for the lot of them.

For those hoping to see more of a consistent back-and-forth between Vancouver and Abbotsford, this is great news.

These numbers will, of course, change between now and the actual outset of the 2026-27 season, and then they’ll change almost daily within the season itself. That’s the nature of a salary cap that is accounted daily. But we don’t think it will change all that drastically, and we don’t think any of those changes will change the overall picture here.

That picture being that the 2026-27 Canucks are loaded up with cap space to an extent they’ve never even approached before.