Immediate CBA impacts and preparing for the 2026 Maple Leafs salary cap situation: Leaflets

Nothing sucks the fun out of a new season of hockey like salary cap and CBA talk so in the spirit of that fun, this week’s Leaflets will be all CBA and salary cap talk and how much those changes have screwed over the Toronto Maple Leafs or their competition.

Immediate CBA changes and the impacts on the Maple Leafs

The NHL and NHLPA sent out a memo to agents and clubs announcing that some items of the newly ratified CBA would be taking effect prior to the start of the collective agreement. Anything that would potentially cost owners more money or the most beneficial player contract causes won’t go live until the actual start date, but some of the easier to comply with items will start now and have some impact on the Maple Leafs.

The full summary of the effective dates as well as detailed explanations of the clauses can be found on PuckPedia, but below are the highlights and how those clauses will affect the Maple Leafs.

The Playoff Salary Cap

The annual salary cap for the 2025-26 season is $95.5M and this post season the expectation is that the lineup for each team on any given playoff game will not consist of 20 players whose annualized salary cap hit combines for an excess of $95.5M.

Additionally, dead cap space like buried contracts (why do this in the post season?), retained salary, and buyouts would still count towards the salary cap, and if a player had their salary retained in a deal it probably goes without saying that only the amount paid by their current team will count towards the salary cap.

The impacts here for the Leafs is that is now a lot less likely that they will have to face a completely juiced Florida Panthers team or other opponent that wants to load up at the trade deadline. The flipside being that the Leafs, a team that always can find cash to spend, can’t do those things either and while Toronto has never been as egregious as Tampa or Florida, closing loopholes for Toronto isn’t ideal.

The running theme of these immediate changes seems to be limiting the trade deadline activity and attempting to find playoff parity.

Limits to LTIR

One of the more interesting things to come into play is that get the full amount of LTIR relief from a player is that they need to be shutdown for the season and the playoffs. The Canadiens can use the full amount of Carey Price’s cap hit because he will not be playing at any point. That’s the way it has always been.

The change comes with someone like Matthew Tkachuk. Before he could go on LTIR and the Panthers could use his full cap hit as relief until he was ready to return, this season and going forward the Panthers will be limited to receiving the previous season’s average salary ($3,817,293) as relief meaning the Panthers still need to put in at least a little bit of work to become cap compliant.

History has shown that the Leafs haven’t been a team to utilize this but that doesn’t mean it’s exciting to see it taken away since if god forbid Matthews, Knies, Rielly, or Nylander have a long term injury, the Leafs wouldn’t be able to load up at the trade deadline for a competitive advantage.

No deferred compensation (effective Oct 7, 2025)

Deferred contracts are more complicated, require a bit of additional understanding, have rarely been utilized, and since they are going away, I’ll skip the part where I fail to explain them properly. Jake McCabe is one of the few players in the league on one and I guess will be the only Leaf on one unless one of the Leafs pending free agents really wants a deferred contract and will re-sign before October 7th.

No more paper loans

Demoting players on off days to save cap space is no more. This was a favourite Brandon Pridham technique especially during the Kyle Dubas years and now sending a player to the AHL or NHL will require them being there for at least one game.

As mentioned, the Leafs were often pinching pennies to build up cap space and they don’t really need to do that at the moment so if there was a time to implement this, 2025-26 is as good as any.

Double retention on a traded contract is no more (or a lot harder)

Players now need to be with a club for 75 days before that team can retain salary on them in a trade. That means in most situations 50% salary retention is as good as it gets. In the wildest of situations teams will trade for players by January 3rd so they can retain an additional 50% on those players at the trade deadline. That’s messy and unlikely so double retention is largely dead.

Given that the Leafs have often relied on these deals the impact is pretty significant. Toronto likely has more cap space to work with than in previous years which will take the sting off.

Four* recall rule

Post trade deadline teams can now recall up to five players post trade deadline but no more than four at a time (excluding for injury reasons.)

That’s a bit more flexibility which is a good thing and as someone who generally supports the notion of load management and is a true believer when it comes to the x-factor of prospects, more Marlies is a good thing.

AHL Loans for 19 year old players

For one brief happy moment it seemed like CHL drafted players might be eligible for AHL assignment in 2025-26 and that Ben Danford could potentially be a member of the Toronto Marlies. That didn’t come to fruition and any plans to make it happen will be revisited on June 15, 2026, with no certainty that the NHL and CHL will agree to it.

While Danford isn’t eligible, Miroslav Holinka is as he was drafted out of Czechia, not the CHL and despite playing for the Edmonton Oil Kings last season the Marlies are an assignment option for him. Easton Cowan and Noah Chadwick being 20 also means that a number of other young Leafs prospects will get their first taste of the AHL and perhaps because of that it’s not the worst thing that Ben Danford will wait another year.

The no stress 2026-27 salary cap

The 2025-26 season is still feeling like a long way off so jumping past it completely to talk about the Maple Leafs’ salary cap situation in the summer of 2026 is a bit premature. A lot can happen over the next 10-11 months and as we’ve seen in the past the Maple Leafs are just one global pandemic away from being back in a tough spot.

Horrific black swan events aside (fully acknowledging we are living in an age of black swan events), the Maple Leafs salary cap situation looks pretty darn good for next season.

Starting with the basics, the Leafs have 16 roster players under contract for 2026-27 and $79M committed against an agreed upon $104M salary cap. That leaves Toronto with around $25M to spend and yes that means they can throw a league maximum deal at Connor McDavid and still be able to fill out the rest of the lineup around him.

The expiration of the contracts of Calle Jarnkrok, Matt Benning, Scott Laughton, and Bobby McMann mean that there will be a couple of roster holes but not necessarily requiring the Leafs put in work on bringing any of these players back. Jarnkrok and Benning are virtual locks to be parting ways with Toronto, and Bobby McMann and Scott Laughton will be 30 and 32 years old respectively and not prime candidates to lock up for long term bottom six forward roles. There is some potential they return but it would be strange for Brad Treliving to pay a premium for either.

The big unrestricted free agent that the Leafs will need to plan for is Anthony Stolarz. He’s earned a pay increase on his team friendly $2.5M cap hit and given that lack of qualified goaltenders around the NHL, he’s destined for a pay raise. How much of a pay raise will depend on how much of a workload he can handle and whether his results remain strong as a result.

Stolarz will at least be a safe bet for landing in the $4M-$5M range but term could be a factor there. If the Leafs aren’t bringing back Stolarz they would need to spend at least that much money to replace him in their tandem but that still easily leaves Toronto in a max money deal for Connor McDavid situation.

Matias Maccelli, Nick Robertson, and Henry Thrun make things a little bit more interesting when it comes to looking at the restricted free agent picture. Optimists will say all three will be destined for pay increases by next season while pessimists might say that potentially two of them won’t even be Leafs by October.

The Leafs could choose to spend nothing on this trio or they could potentially combine for around $10M depending on how well all three of them prove they can do.

No matter what, the Leafs would comfortably be able to bring them back if they wanted to, it’s just a little too early to know what the plans are here.

This summer has proven something. Teams have enough money to bring back their players and selection is going to be extremely limited. Or at least that is one way it could play out.

The other way it could play out is that the players start chasing bigger paydays and contracts that would previously been deemed absurd, and we start seeing a lot more Mikael Granlund $7M AAV deals or Christian Dvorak $5.4M deals thrown around just to create an incentive for movement. If that’s the case, having contracts for Stolarz, Maccelli, Robertson, McMann, Laughton and Thrun could get expensive.

There is a long path to the next summer and knowing that the Leafs will need to make some trades and have a preference for adding players with term at the deadline, the salary cap picture is best described as incomplete but promising.