It’s over, it’s done, and the Puckpedia page has been updated.

Quinn Hughes is a Vancouver Canuck no longer. In his place, however, stand three new players – Zeev Buium, Marco Rossi, and Liam Öhgren – and an extra first-round pick yet to be made. Obviously, any three- or four-for-one trade is going to have an impact on the shape of the roster. And any changes to the roster have an impact on the salary cap. So much has changed since this trade that we felt the need to provide a quick update on the Canucks’ cap space post-Hughes and what they might be able to do with it moving forward.

For the record, this writing is being done on Wednesday morning, following the Canucks’ Tuesday shutout of the New York Rangers, and following the waiving of Arshdeep Bains.

Bains coming off the roster leaves the Canucks with an active cast of 13 forwards, seven defenders, and two goalies, with all of Elias Pettersson (Sr.), Teddy Blueger, and Filip Chytil still listed as being on the IR, while Derek Forbort is still listed on long-term injured reserve.

The best news about the Bains re-assignment is that it almost certainly means another forward will be activated and rejoin the lineup ahead of Friday’s game against the New York Islanders. The odds seem good that it will be Pettersson, whose injury was always described as day-to-day. And with that, the Canucks should be officially under the salary cap for the first time in a good long while.

The Canucks, of course, started the 2025-26 under the cap, and had designs on staying that way throughout the entire campaign, so as to accrue cap space – but injuries got in the way of that. By a couple of weeks into October, the Canucks had lost enough bodies that they needed to make more recalls than the cap would allow. At that point, they placed Nils Höglander on retroactive LTIR to gain a little relief space, and eventually, Forbort was also placed there, too. Using LTIR space allows a team to temporarily exceed the cap so as to replace an injured player, but while ‘in LTIR,’ teams are not accruing any additional cap space.

Thankfully, as of now, that is over, at least for the time being. In fact, the waiving of Lukas Reichel already brought the Canucks to just a smidgen under the cap. The subsequent waiving of Bains puts them below enough to actually begin accruing some meaningful cap.

The Canucks’ Puckpedia page will be updated with the exact numbers whenever Bains either clears waivers or is claimed by another team later today. But if our morning estimates are correct, the Canucks were about $874,782 under the projected cap with Bains, and should be about $1.65 million or so under the projected cap with Bains’ $775,000 hit removed.

But the ‘projected cap’ is just a measure that means ‘if nothing changed between now and the end of the year, how much of the $95.5 million total yearly cap allowance would this team spend.’ In other words, it’s not a team’s ‘real’ or functional cap space. To get that, we have to add accrual into the formula.

We know we’ve explained this one countless times, but we’re getting better at doing so succinctly. In reality, the salary cap is daily, and the real salary cap is the total cap ($95.5 million) divided by the number of days on the NHL schedule (days, not games). In short, a team can’t spend more than that number, in terms of cap hits, on any given day of the season. So, for each day they spend less than that number, they save a little bit of cap that could be spent in future days.

Best of all, as the season progresses, the amount of daily cap hits a team has to pay for any given player decreases, making players with large annual cap hits easier to fit under a daily cap ceiling if space has been accrued.

The Canucks did successfully accrue some space at the start of the season, and that money doesn’t go away until it is spent. So, even prior to the Bains demotion, they were at about $1.38 million of functional cap space, and that amount was projected to accrue to about $3.99 million in usable space by the Trade Deadline.

Now that Bains is off the roster, that amount increases daily. Assuming no changes to the roster between now and March, the current setup would accrue to more than $6 million by the deadline, which means that’s the amount of annual cap hit the Canucks could freely add to their roster at that point.

Of course, the current setup will not hold. More injuries will inevitably occur, and it sure sounds like more trades are coming in the near-ish future. The roster will change, the cap will change as a result, and the amount of ‘Deadline Space’ will go up and down on a near-daily basis.

But at this point, it is a bit hard to imagine the Canucks doing anything different than accruing more and more space as the year wears on. It doesn’t seem like they’re in the market to add major cap hits, and if they do, it will probably be in the form of a cap dump at or near the deadline. In fact, carving out space to accommodate cap dumps is probably the smartest thing the Canucks can do with this accrued cap, as taking cap dumps can yield some nice draft picks around the deadline.

There are also the roster freezes at the holidays and again during the Olympics to consider. The Canucks should be able to accrue some extra space over those periods by setting their roster a little minimally heading in – like, for example, sending the likes of Elias Pettersson (Jr.), Liam Öhgren, or Max Sasson down to Abbotsford for some extra seasoning prior to that December 19 freeze.

The major takeaway, however, is that the Canucks are now significantly below the cap after being above it for much of the season, putting them back on track to have extra cash to spend at the Trade Deadline.

There’s really no downside to that.