On Wednesday’s episode of Canucks Conversation, David Quadrelli and Harman Dayal were joined by Puck Pedia’s Hart Levin to help make sense of some of the most significant changes in the NHL’s new CBA — starting with the introduction of a playoff salary cap.

“The playoff cap system is brand new and it’s for the 20 players who are dressed in the playoff game,” Levin explained. “In the regular season, injured players, scratches, etc. all count against the cap. The playoff cap will only be the dressed players and only for the game being played. It’s the same salary cap as the season – this year it’s $95.5 million – and it includes all the dead cap charges you have for the year: buyouts, retention, bonus overages, if you have someone buried in the minors, that all counts towards your cap number.”

Levin pointed out one key difference that could have a huge effect on roster building. “When you acquire a player in the regular season, they’re only charged for the portion of the season remaining,” he said. “That’s why cap space is more valuable at the trade deadline. A $10 million dollar player only costs you around $2 million if you get him at the deadline. In the playoff cap, there’s no pro-rating. It’s their full annual cap hit. So that $10 million dollar player, even though he was only charged $2 million during the regular season, now you need to fit his whole $10 million in the playoff cap. That may lead to less trade activity at the deadline.”

Harm added that this is just one of a few changes that could make life tougher for cap-strapped teams like the Canucks. “Between that, and other changes like no more paper transactions, it’s going to be a lot harder to carve out space,” he said. “Because Abbotsford is so close, what the Canucks would do is on off days, they’d send down someone like Arshdeep Bains as a paper transaction. Since cap space accrues daily, that would give them a little extra space, and over a season it really adds up. That option’s gone now. Combine that with the playoff cap system and no more double-retention trades, it seems like if you’re a team tight up against the cap at the start of the season, it’s going to be way harder to make in-season trades compared to years past. The cap space you start with matters a lot more now.”

According to Levin, the NHL’s goal was to stop teams from using loopholes in ways that, in their view, went against the spirit of the cap. “It sounds like the NHL felt like double retentions, using LTIR the way it was being used, they felt like it was against the spirit of the salary cap,” Levin said. “They wanted teams to have a roster at the start of the season that was cap compliant and not have all these maneuvers to build it up. In that sense, it’s probably mission accomplished.”

But the downside, he cautioned, is a quieter market. “I think we’ll see less trades as a result,” Levin said. “Teams close to the cap can still accrue a little bit, trade for a player at the deadline, and because you’re only counting 20 players in the playoff cap instead of 23 or 25, you can make that work. But it’s going to reduce the number of trades and trades that involve high cap hits at the deadline. The unintended consequence is way less trade activity, and I don’t know how that’s good for anybody. A lot of what we do is fueled by trade activity, speculation, and discussion, so we’ll see how it goes.”

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