At the time of writing, the Canadiens, Golden Knights, and Panthers are the only three teams that have negative projected cap space to open the season, per PuckPedia.

Those clubs also have high-priced LTIR candidates. Montreal’s Carey Price and Vegas’ Alex Pietrangelo are either retired or ruled out for the season and have cap hits higher than the amount their respective clubs are in the hole. Florida is likely to have Matthew Tkachuk miss significant time to start the year as he continues to get back to full health from last season’s adductor injury. While they won’t have a whole year’s worth of LTIR relief for him, they still have a clear pathway to compliance to start the season without making a cap-shedding trade.

But while these teams have a pathway to cap compliance, it’s not as simple as making an LTIR placement and calling it a day. LTIR usage isn’t blanket cap relief based on the cap hit of the injured player – the amount of financial relief a team gets is tied directly to how well a team optimizes its roster before making the placement.

There are two methods of going about this. The first, and more common one, is waiting until the start of the season to place a player on LTIR.

That means a club needs to, even if it’s for a matter of minutes via paper transactions, be cap-compliant without LTIR usage before making the placement and using their newfound flexibility to restore their roster. The difference between the LTIR player’s cap hit and the cap space available when making the placement will be the relief pool amount the team has to work with – hence why teams using LTIR to start the year try to get as close to $0 in cap space as possible to unlock the player’s full cap hit in relief.

The second involves the usage of offseason LTIR. If a team opts to place a player on LTIR before the season starts, the relief amount is equivalent to their cap excess. In that case, it behooves a team to spend more to boost the amount they exceed the cap by as close as the injured player’s cap hit as possible.

That second method is almost certainly what Vegas will use. Their roster is currently set to exceed the cap by $7.64MM, per PuckPedia, roughly $1.16MM shy of Pietrangelo’s $8.8MM cap hit.

With the rest of their offseason business done and one roster spot open, the Knights still haven’t signed restricted free agent winger Alexander Holtz to a new contract for 2025-26. Signing him to a one-year deal worth exactly $1,161,429 would allow them to have a perfect LTIR capture when opening-night rosters are due, allowing them the full $8.8MM relief amount throughout the season. That figure is above Holtz’s market value anyway, so it’s unlikely they’d have any trouble convincing him to ink that contract.

At first glance, Florida’s pathway to making things work is more likely the first option, if for no other reason than the fact they’ll need the flexibility to activate Tkachuk in-season when he’s cleared to play. They’re also much closer to no cap exceedance than $9.5MM, Tkachuk’s cap hit, worth of exceedance.

Wouldn’t the Panthers thus look to clear exactly their projected exceedance of $3.725MM via paper transactions that can be reversed after Tkachuk’s LTIR placement? Not exactly.

Usually, teams in that situation have a few young waiver-exempt players on their roster that they can briefly send down to the AHL to achieve the intended result. The Panthers have no waiver-exempt players on their projected 22-player roster, and the likelihood of a claim for highly-regarded Cup-winning depth talent like Jesper Boqvist, Jonah Gadjovich, or A.J. Greer is almost 100%.

With the Cats prioritizing continuity between last year’s championship team and this one above all else, it stands to reason they might simply take severely reduced LTIR flexibility out of the gate. Making no other moves before LTIRing Tkachuk would leave them with only $3.725MM in flexibility to open the season, compared to their potential $9.5MM if they tried to optimize his relief. Still, as they’d need to activate him later in the year, they wouldn’t take full advantage of that $9.5MM even if they had it.

As for the Canadiens, they’re stuck in the mushy middle. Price’s cap hit is $10.5MM, and their projected exceedance is $5.93MM. That means they’d either need to shed nearly $6MM in cap space or add over $4.5MM worth of cap hits to take advantage of his placement fully.

For a team on the rise with playoff aspirations and some holes in their middle-six forward group, the latter outcome is the likelier one. They still only have $4.5MM in flexibility if they decide to go that route, though, pricing them out of a new deal for top centers on the trade market like RFAs Mason McTavish and Marco Rossi without sending a significant salary – potentially Kirby Dach’s $3.36MM cap hit or Alex Newhook’s $2.9MM cap hit – back the other way to help make up the difference.