How will the new CBA changes affect the Edmonton Oilers?

What changes can we expect?

There is some interesting stuff being updated here. Most notably, is that the league is finally trying to take steps to eliminate LTIR abuse and playing over the salary cap in the playoffs. Unfortunately, it only comes immediately after the Oilers finally took advantage of an LTIR situation like some other teams had been, and continue to do so, for years.

The solution that the league will be implementing in relation to LTIR cap relief will limit the relief a team can utilize to the league average salary if a player is expected to return that regular season or playoffs.

Additionally, for playoff rosters, the dressed players for any game must be cap compliant with that season’s cap ceiling. That is a simple version of it. Other factors apply, such as certain bonuses not factoring in, dead cap space accumulated through the season (from, for example, buried cap hits) apply even if the player is no longer with the team, player cap hits are not prorated, which also applies to retention. If a player is 25% retained, then the full 75% remaining applies to the cap for a playoff game day.

In the full breakdown, Puckpedia has determined that in game six of the 2025 Stanley Cup Final, the Oilers were $7,353,277 below the cap while the Florida Panthers were $5,038,282 over the cap. (But the Oilers were the team that got publicly investigated for abusing the LTIR system after the fact.)

For other changes, contracts signed with deferred compensation will not longer be allowed, paper loans to the AHL are restricted and the process has changed, and the same goes for double retention on trades.

Going forward, when a player is sent to the AHL, they must play a game with the AHL team before being recalled. Meaning that players cannot be sent down in between games for cap purposes unless they are actually playing in the AHL.

The past few seasons, some trade deadline trades have utilized double retention at the time of the trade so that the team receiving the player is only on the hook for a prorated 25% of their cap hit. That will no longer be possible in the same way, as there are now time restrictions on these types of trades. There must be 75 regular season days between trades retaining salary on the same player.

How will these changes impact the Edmonton Oilers?

Since it appears that the Oilers were the catalyst for changing the LTIR and playoff salary cap systems with their egregious use of LTIR through the season during Evander Kane’s injury recovery, they will no longer be able to repeat that. Which shouldn’t impact them too much as the roster looks to be mostly healthy heading into 2025–26. The one question mark will be Zach Hyman’s wrist injury, as it was speculated from the get-go that he may not be fully healthy for game one.

Petty whining aside, the major areas where the Oilers will be affected by these CBA changes are in AHL paper transactions and double retention trades.

Is the AHL team too far away?

The Oilers were not a huge user of paper transactions and brief AHL loans. It did happen here and there but it was not a major part of the team’s strategy. But, they still did take advantage of this at times with some players during breaks between games.

With the addition of the requirement that a player plays an AHL game before being recalled, the distance between Edmonton and Bakersfield becomes even more of a barrier than it used to be. It was already difficult at times to recall players on short notice. But now, if the Oilers want to send someone down to the AHL, they’ll have to actually go out of their way to (likely) travel down to California to play a game, then travel back to rejoin the Oilers wherever they are.

This may reignite discussion around trying to move the AHL affiliate closer to, if not in, Edmonton. Solely to help with making it easier to move players between the NHL and AHL if both teams are in Edmonton for half of their respective seasons.

It isn’t as simple as just moving the team, and the cost benefits the Condors have travelling by bus to their most common opponents all in California make the team far more financially sustainable. But from a hockey operations standpoint, there is a new argument to be made for moving the Condors up north.

A brand new trade deadline strategy

The other changes that will impact the Oilers quite significantly is the new restrictions on double retention in trades. In each of the last two trade deadlines, Edmonton has utilized this to get their deadline target for even cheaper. Adam Henrique and Trent Frederic were both retained twice on acquisition.

With this new rule, cap strapped contending teams looking to add at the deadline will be very limited in what they can do. Sure, teams can work around it by trading rental players elsewhere early in the season and then flipping them again at the deadline.

But that makes things very complicated. I can imagine most players would not be on board with 20 game stints in random cities before being traded a second time. Not everyone is Mikko Rantanen, after all.

What this means is that the trade deadline might be quieter in terms of buying. The pieces added may be lower in the lineup, if the Oilers are already pushing up against the cap. And in terms of filling the final roster holes with meaningful improvements, that just became much more challenging.

All-in-all, the changes should do wonders for levelling the playing field for teams in the playoffs and prevent the most obnoxious cases of teams abusing the system in place to their advantage. Limiting LTIR relief when a player is expected to return that season may make it difficult to fill the roster in the case of high salary players being hurt. But that, combined with a playoff game day salary cap, does prevent teams from stacking up super teams for the playoffs.