Look, Jonathan Lekkerimäki was going to have a difficult time cracking the Vancouver Canucks roster this season by any measure.

The Canucks already have some 17 other forwards, all of whom played NHL minutes last year, competing for a maximum of 13 forward spots in Training Camp. Lekkerimäki, meanwhile, just turned 20 a couple of months ago, and has just six games of North American pro hockey under his belt.

Lekkerimäki is the most skilled prospect in the entire organization, and that some folks are giving him an outside shot of making the team this year is a testament to that skill. But in addition to his age, experience, and the competition ensuring an uphill ice-skate for Lekkerimäki, he’s also got another factor working against him that is entirely outside his control: his own performance bonuses.

Performance bonuses are a strange quirk in the cap era of NHL hockey. They can only be offered to players on the extreme ends of their careers – players on entry-level contracts, and players who sign contracts at the age of 35 or greater.

Performance bonuses don’t get paid out until the performance thresholds tied to them get hit. For example, if a player has a bonus for 20 goals on a certain year of their ELC, they don’t actually get that money unless and until they score 20 goals in that year. That’s all simple enough to understand.

But how those potential performance bonuses affect the salary cap? That’s decidedly more complicated.

In brief, performance bonuses work one of two ways. If a player with performance bonuses is on a team’s roster to start the year – as in, on their officially-registered opening day roster – that player’s potential performance bonuses go into something called a “performance bonus relief pool.” The amount of theoretical money in this pool is actually allowed to go over the salary cap ceiling by a maximum of 7.5%, and it’s a buffer intended to prevent teams from experiencing a cap violation just because a player on their team earned some bonuses.

If a player in this situation doesn’t hit their bonus marks, it’s no big deal, and that money never gets paid out or actually counts against the cap. If the player does hit their marks, the team is covered. Any bonus amounts that fit under the current year’s cap ceiling are counted against it in the current year, and any amounts that exceed the current year’s ceiling are rolled over to the next season.

The Canucks experienced this a couple of years ago with Andrei Kuzmenko’s performance bonuses. He hit virtually all his bonus requirements as a first year player, but because he was on the roster from Day One, the Canucks had a performance bonus relief cushion. When Kuzmenko’s eventual bonus payments technically pushed the Canucks over the cap ceiling for 2022/23, the excess amount was rolled over to the 2023/24 books with no additional penalty.

However, this performance bonus relief pool only comes into effect for a player that is on a team’s opening day roster.

The way performance bonuses work for a player not on a teams’ opening day roster – as in one that a team has to recall at a later date – is decidedly more simple, but oh so much harder to navigate.

For any player not on a team’s opening day roster that is later recalled, a team must have enough cap space on hand to accommodate that player’s maximum potential salary, in full. In other words, any player who is recalled after Day One have their cap hits counted as their base salary plus the maximum amount of performance bonuses they can still earn.

And that’s easier said than done for teams that fly close to the cap ceiling.

It’s an issue the Canucks ran into last year with Vasily Podkolzin, and we wrote about it. In case you’ve forgotten, Podkolzin did not make the Canucks out of Training Camp last season, but the Canucks wanted to maintain the ability to call him up at a later date. Unfortunately, Podkolzin had some $850,000 in potential performance bonuses attached to the final year of his ELC, and so if the Canucks wanted to recall him past opening day, he would have incurred an effective cap hit of $1,775,000 – more than the Canucks could reasonably squeeze.

The Canucks’ opening day roster for 2024 only contained five healthy defenders – Quinn Hughes, Filip Hronek, Ian Cole, Tyler Myers, and Noah Juulsen – with Tucker Poolman on LTIR and Carson Soucy soon to be headed to IRs of their own.

Rookies Cole McWard and Akito Hirose won the rights to cover those injuries in Training Camp. But neither McWard nor Hirose required waivers in order to be sent down to Abbotsford. So, prior to setting the opening day roster, the Canucks simply waived McWard and Hirose and recalled Podkolzin. In doing so, they locked in Podkolzin’s performance bonus relief pool at that max of $850,000.

Then, they sent Podkolzin right back down and recalled both McWard and Hirose prior to the season opener. That’s what is typically meant by a ‘paper transaction.’ McWard and Hirose were never really cut, and Podkolzin was never really back on the team – it was all cap management.

All of which brings us neatly enough back to Lekkerimäki.

Lekkerimäki’s ELC for this year allows for performance bonuses of up to $450,000. ‘No big deal,’ you might be thinking, ‘If he doesn’t make the team outright, the Canucks can just use the same trick they did last year with Podkolzin and use a paper transaction to place Lekkerimäki on the opening day roster before sending him back down to Abbotsford.’

Unfortunately, things aren’t quite so simply handled this season.

The issue is a lack of waivers-exempt players.

Of the roughly 25 players definitively in the running for a spot on the Canucks this year – meaning Elias Pettersson, JT Miller, Quinn Hughes, Filip Hronek, Brock Boeser, Jake DeBrusk, Thatcher Demko, Conor Garland, Dakota Joshua, Carson Soucy, Tyler Myers, Danton Heinen, Vincent Desharnais, Teddy Blueger, Pius Suter, Derek Forbort, Kiefer Sherwood, Nils Höglander, Daniel Sprong, Nils Åman, Phil di Giuseppe, Linus Karlsson, Noah Juulsen, Mark Friedman, and Arturs Silovs – only one does not have to be passed through waivers to be sent down.

That player? It’s Silovs. Which doesn’t help much in the paper transaction game, because every opening day roster needs to have two goaltenders on it, so Silovs (or another goaltender) has to be there, and cannot give up their spot, even temporarily, for Lekkerimäki.

So, in order to fit Lekkerimäki on the opening day roster of a max 23 players, the Canucks would have to cut and waive three of the aforementioned players. Maybe that’s something they’re comfortable with – we can imagine the trio of Di Giuseppe, Karlsson, and Friedman being waived without many compunctions – but that still feels like a bit of an unnecessary risk to take just for the possibility of later calling Lekkerimäki up.

Then again, the way things are currently trending, at least two of those three players is going to have to be cut and waived regardless, as there are only 23 spots on the team.

This whole process becomes even more complicated if Demko is not healthy to start the year. With the team’s stated goal of not using LTIR relief space, they’d need room for Demko’s temporary replacement. Right now, a 23-player roster with Demko has the Canucks an estimated $190,000 or so under the cap, which isn’t enough for even a single league-minimum contract. To keep Demko off LTIR but still on the shelf, the Canucks would need to cut and waive three of the 26 listed players just to have enough space to call up a Jiri Patera type to fill in for Demko.

Again, a paper transaction could help here, as in waiving three players prior to the setting of opening day roster, putting Lekkerimäki and Demko on there, and then swapping Lekkerimäki for Patera the next day.

But should Lekkerimäki not be on the opening day roster, calling him up at a later date will be a challenge. The Canucks would need to carve out $1,393,333 (his full amount of salary plus potential bonuses) in cap space in order to recall him.

That’s not space they are projected to have anytime soon.

Really, there are four potential outcomes here.

One: Lekkerimäki makes the team outright, and is on that opening day roster with no need for paper transactions. This is the simplest outcome, but perhaps the most unlikely.

Two: Demko is ready for Game One, and the Canucks are thus able to paper Lekkerimäki onto the roster, albeit at the risk of losing someone like Di Giuseppe, Friedman, or Karlsson to waivers. They achieve a bonus performance relief pool and then send Lekkerimäki down to Abbotsford until he’s ready for a recall. Alternatively, they do the Patera shuffle we described a few paragraphs back.

Three: Lekkerimäki is not on the opening day roster, and the team cannot recall him until they achieve $1,393,333 in cap space…which they do, over time, by staying out of LTIR and accruing daily cap space. This would take months, but it would allow for Lekkerimäki to be called up later.

Four: Lekkerimäki doesn’t get called up this year, because the team is not able to accrue enough cap space.

And then there’s the secret fifth option, in which the Canucks abandon their hopes to stay out of LTIR, place Tucker Poolman there, and use his relief space to call up Lekkerimaki to their heart’s content.

There are enough outcomes here to prevent us calling this any sort of crisis. And in the end, Lekkerimäki doesn’t really need to be called up this year, as it is his first full year in North America and he is probably best served by paying big minutes in the AHL.

It’s mostly just an example of how fraught and difficult these preseason decisions can be, and how something that is ostensibly positive – like having performance bonuses on one’s contract – can actually greatly complicate matters, and might even conspire to prevent a player from being recalled when they otherwise would.

Maybe it’s something the NHL and NHLPA want to look at in the next round of CBA negotiations. For now, it’s just another something for AGM Émilie Castonguay and the rest of the Canucks front office to navigate.