Folks, since the COVID-19 stoppage in March 2020, the National Hockey League’s salary cap has been almost entirely flat as the NHL’s revenues were wildly disrupted and the players gradually paid off their $1.1 billion escrow debt to the owners.

But no more. According to reports from the NHL’s Board of Governors meeting, the salary cap will be going up for the 2024-25 season – potentially to as high as $87.675 million.

The salary cap in 2019-20 was $81.5 million. The cap remained flat for the 2020-21 and 2021-22 seasons, and made a gigantic leap in each of the next two seasons… by $1 million per season. As a result, the cap inched up to $82.5 million for 2022-23 and $83.5 million for 2023-24.

Under the terms of the CBA, the league and players have to split hockey-related revenues 50/50 and the players were paid more than their share due to the 2019-20 season ending prematurely. But after keeping the cap artificially low for the past few seasons, the debt is paid off and now under the terms of the most recent CBA extension, the cap can go up by 5% per season.

A 5% increase of the current cap ceiling would be to $87.675 million. (It’s unclear if the league and NHLPA would agree to round the cap number up or not.)

The Flames currently have 11 players under one-way contracts for the 2024-25 season: two goaltenders, two defencemen and seven forwards, with $55.625 million committed and $32.05 million available to fill out the roster. The signed players are goaltenders Jacob Markstrom and Dan Vladar; defencemen MacKenzie Weegar and Rasmus Andersson; forwards Jonathan Huberdeau, Nazem Kadri, Andrew Mangiapane, Mikael Backlund, Blake Coleman, Yegor Sharangovich and Walker Duehr.

The NHL still needs to officially cement the cap number, which won’t happen until much closer to the end of the season, but this gives teams a much clearer idea of what kind of space they have to work with next season (and beyond).