The NHL’s salary cap was at least in part an attempt to promote league parity. Sure, it was probably always about controlling expenditures as much as anything, but the parity angle was a part of it. And, for a while there, the league did achieve a greater level of evenness.

The recent surge in the cap ceiling, however, has seemed to have the opposite effect. With so much spending space suddenly available, and more coming each year, the NHL’s richest and most efficient teams are at a distinct advantage, especially as it pertains to retaining their own talent.

It used to be that the salary cap performed a bit of a natural balancing act. A team would get good, they’d go on a run, maybe win a Stanley Cup, and then their players would start to demand salaries in line with all that winning. They couldn’t afford to keep them all, so they’d have to sell off a few ‘cap casualties,’ and the rest of the league got a chance to catch up via a little talent redistribution.

But with the cap having gone up nearly 30% since the end of the flat cap era, even the best and most superstar-laden rosters are finding it hard to run out of space, and thus finding it hard to see any of those natural consequences for their success. Look no further than the Carolina Hurricanes, who have been able to bring essentially their whole Cup-winning team back for another season, and who still somehow have $10 million in cap space to burn. Or the previous two-time champs, the Florida Panthers, who somehow managed to take what they already had, add Brady Tkachuk to the mix, and swap out Sergei Bobrovsky for Jacob Markstrom.

Go around the list of usual contenders, and you’ll find almost all of them have fully-built rosters, few offseason departures, and ample cap space remaining. The only exceptions to that rule seem to be the Dallas Stars, the long-mismanaged Toronto Maple Leafs, and the Vegas Golden Knights, to whom the salary cap doesn’t really apply.

It’s not too tough to figure out what’s going on here. With more cap space available every year, the best teams are more easily able to retain their own talent on a season-to-season basis. There are hardly any cap casualties being traded anymore, and far fewer players are making it to unrestricted free agency, in general, than ever before. Just take a look at the paltry list of UFAs available this past July 1 as evidence of that.

All of this can be taken as obvious bad news for the Vancouver Canucks, a team that has an awful lot of catching up to do before they can one day be counted among the contenders themselves.

However, there are other methods of evening out teams in the NHL, and the Canucks might have to take advantage of them as they seek alternative ways to gain ground. That includes a method far, far older than the salary cap itself: the waiver process.

The original idea behind waivers was that it would prevent rich teams from ‘stashing’ too much talent in the minor leagues. If a team were so loaded up with NHL-level players that they had to send some of them down to their farm clubs, well then, it stood to reason that other teams could probably use those players more.

(For those unfamiliar with the process, once they hit a certain threshold of age and experience, NHL players must be put through waivers before being re-assigned to the minor leagues. Waivers are a process through which the player is offered up to all other 31 NHL rosters in turn, with the order based on either the previous year’s standings or the current year, depending on when the waiving happens. The Canucks picked up Curtis Douglas via this process just last year.)

From a league perspective, the waiver process was intended to help spread talent around a little, and help the lesser lights of the league build up their rosters through waiver pickups. And though waivers are actually older than the NHLPA itself, the union likes the process because it prevents punitive demotions and also because it keeps more players deserving of league time actually playing in the league.

It’s that talent-sharing component of waivers that should be taking precedence in this new, cap-expanded era. Yes, all this extra cap space has made it easier for teams to retain their own players, at least financially. But all teams are still capped at an active roster of just 23 players.

That should mean that the very best and best-run teams – the ones that teams like the Canucks would want to pilfer players from in the first place – are going to run out of roster space before they run out of cap space.

And the natural consequence of that should be a better quality of player available on waivers than ever before.

The best teams are the ones that tend to have the most consistent development and the ability to churn out NHLers almost constantly. In the past, these teams would have to rely on those internal replacements to take the places of the more established veterans who had priced themselves out. But now, with fewer and fewer players pricing themselves out, this replacement class of players has to wait even longer for opportunities. Long enough, in some cases, that they will become eligible for waivers before securing their full-time spot on the roster, at which point they become available to the rest of the league.

This process could start as soon as this upcoming preseason. Many of the league’s top rosters are a little overstuffed at the moment, and there’s already plenty of chatter in fan forums about the necessity of ‘sneaking’ certain younger players through waivers come Training Camp.

There’s always talent available on the waiver wire in early October as teams make final cuts and set their opening day roster. The difference this year, and in the years to come, will be that the talent available has improved in both quantity and quality.

Which can’t help but be taken as good news for the Canucks. As the last-place finisher in the 2025-26 campaign, they’ll have the top claim on anyone put on waivers until November 1. That means they get first crack at anyone who is waived before the season starts and for the first month thereafter.

The odds of the Canucks picking up someone who can at least make a difference via waivers are now higher than ever. Waivers are not a powerful enough phenomenon to affect league parity all by itself, but it is a tool the Canucks can use as they try to catch up, gain ground, and, more importantly, add as much talent to their current roster as is reasonably possible.