Changes are afoot in the National Hockey League for the 2025-26 season, friends.

The new collective bargaining agreement has been reported upon extensively. But while the CBA doesn’t come into force until Sept. 16, 2026… per some reporting from our pals at PuckPedia, several parts of the CBA will come into force for this coming season.

Here is what’s new for 2025-26, and how these changes might impact the Calgary Flames.

A lot of fans – and hockey people, frankly – have been confused and frustrated by long-term injury reserve (LTIR) cap relief over the years. Well, good news, the mechanism is getting simplified.

Teams can still exceed the salary cap by up to the cap hit of the injured player being replaced – we don’t need to get into the specific math here. But for any player that’s expected to return in-season, their LTIR relief is now capped at 2024-25’s average salary ($3,817,923). So, say Jonathan Huberdeau gets injured and is placed on LTIR: the Flames would only receive up to $3,817,923 in LTIR relief during his absence.

Teams can receive more than league-average salary relief, though, but only for players that are out for the remainder of the season – and those players would be ineligible to return for the rest of the season and the playoffs.

The Flames have ample salary cap space right now (just over $15 million, per PuckPedia), so they likely wouldn’t need to delve into LTIR.

So, remember how the Flames engaged in three-team swaps when they traded Chris Tanev and Noah Hanifin in 2024? Well, that won’t fly now. Under the new CBA, retained salary trades impacting a player’s contract can only be done once every 75 regular season days.

So if you were thinking “Oh man, the Flames could use a double-retention trade to get Rasmus Andersson’s cap hit down to $1.14 million!”… Well, not anymore. It could be a bit of a minor hindrance for teams, like the Flames, looking to sell off expiring assets and trying to maximize their returns by getting their cap hits down, but it’s probably not the end of the world.

For those who aren’t familiar with the term, a “paper transaction” is when a team sends a player down to their AHL affiliate but maybe a day or two, then brings them back up immediately.

Teams tend to use paper transactions for two main reasons:

The Flames have trended towards the second category lately. They have the Wranglers playing in the same building, and so they can swap players down the hall to the AHL pretty easily, and they’ve done so as recently as last season with players like Jakob Pelletier, Walker Duehr and Adam Klapka.

The new rule is that if a player is sent down from the NHL to the AHL, they have to play a game before they’re eligible to be called back up to the NHL. (There’s an exception for situations where a team would be short a goaltender without calling one up.) The impact on the Flames could be fairly subtle: when last season the Flames kept swapping Klapka up and down from the Wranglers, this coming season they might just rotate a pair of players up and down so they always have a few players eligible to be brought back up.

The old CBA limited teams to four non-emergency call-ups after the trade deadline (subject to the usual salary cap limitations), in an effort to prevent teams that were out of the playoff hunt from just bringing up their entire AHL roster. The four recall limit is now a five recall limit, with teams limited to having four players on their roster at any one time on non-emergency recalls.

(If your team would otherwise be short bodies for a game, you’re still allowed to call up players after the trade deadline on an emergency basis without it counting against your non-emergency limit.)

Good news, there’s a salary cap in the playoffs now!

Here’s how it works: on game days, teams submit a 20-player game lineup (two goalies, 18 skaters). The base cap hits of that game lineup, plus all other regular season cap obligations (buyouts, burials, and retained cap hits). Injured or inactive players on the NHL roster would not count against that playoff salary cap, just the players on that daily lineup. For salaries retained during the current season, cap hits are proportional to the full season cap hit, not pro-rated.

So if the Flames, hypothetically, trade Andersson to another team at 50% cap hit retained, they would carry that $2.275 million cap hit in the playoffs, even if the trade wasn’t made until the trade deadline.

The Flames would absolutely love to have to worry about the playoff salary cap.

Finally, while the various parties are discussing allowing 19-year-olds to play in the AHL, all indications are that won’t be something that happens this season. So for Zayne Parekh and Jacob Battaglia, their playing options are NHL or OHL for the coming season.

This article is a presentation of Platinum Mitsubishi, family owned and operated by lifelong Calgarians. Home of the industry-leading 10-year, 160,000-kilometre powertrain warranty. Check out their showroom at 2720 Barlow Trail NE or online at www.mitsu.ca.