Ow, that hurt

When the Leafs operated with 20 or 21 players hard on the salary cap ceiling, cap space was the limiting factor for all roster actions. Now, like last season, the 23-man roster limit is the main factor.

From Monday at 5pm on the last day of training camp through to midnight before the trade deadline, teams are limited to 23 healthy players on the roster. What a team does with the unhealthy depends on the situation.

Injured Reserve

IR, as it's known, removes a player from the roster count, but not the salary cap. The tricky part about IR is that it has to last for seven days, so if a player has a two-day head cold or a one-game minor injury, it's not helpful. This is why teams have more than the minimum of 18 skaters on the roster in the first place.

Assignments to Injured Reserve are made by submitting a special form defined in the CBA to be filed with the league. The league can verify the medical reason whenever they like, and it is the NHL that provides the earliest possible reactivation date on the form. The assignment can be backdated to the date of the injury when needed.

The other variations on IR are first and foremost assignments to the IR list, so the roster rules apply to all of them.

Season Opening IR

SOIR is a special form of IR for players who report to training camp injured or who become injured during camp. There are no roster limits in training camp, so this matters on Monday at 5pm when the cap-compliant 23-man roster is filed. If a player is injured on that day, he is exempt from the 23-man limit, but his cap hit depends on his contract status, so a digression into one-way and two-way contracts is now in order.

One way and two way contracts were named at a time when the type of contract determined waiver status and recall and assignment rules. That ended 20 years ago with the post-lockout CBA. Now the distinction is commonly said to be about salary. A one-way contract has one salary amount payable if the player is in the NHL or has been assigned to the AHL. A two-way has a lower amount for time spent in the AHL. There is a lot more to the difference, however, but most of the time it's esoteric things like benefits, per diems and the offseason salary cap or tagging room calculations so you can safely ignore it. However, it also matters for SOIR.

If a player injured in camp is on a two-way contract and was not on the roster for 50 or more NHL games in the prior year their cap hit is discounted while they sit out their injury. The key point here is that injured players cannot be sent to the AHL, so they remain on the NHL roster until healthy and can only be waived, if necessary, at that time. If the player is on a one-way contract, their full cap hit applies.

The discounting formula for those on two-way contracts is based on the number of days on the NHL roster the prior year, which means their cap charge is zero if they were never in the NHL.

If the player is on a one-way contract, and therefore counts fully against the cap, they can be placed on LTIR if they have a serious enough injury to meet the time requirements.

For this season, this applies (so far) to Marshall Rifai and now Scott Laughton. Rifai is on a one-way contract of $775,000, so he counts against the cap unless LTIR is used until he is ready to return. Laughton's cap hit is $1.5 million, and the same thing applies, he can be put on LTIR if requires. Both are listed now as week-to-week.

LTIR

The new CBA's LTIR rule changes take effect now for this season, so we have two kinds of LTIR to understand.

LTIR is for injuries or illnesses that will last at least 10 games played or 24 days, whichever is longer. LTIR can be backdated to the date of the injury during the season and players on LTIR are naturally exempt from the roster limit.

It is possible to use LTIR in the offseason, and those rules remain in place unchanged. The new concept is for the regular season only. There is no LTIR in the playoffs.

Regular LTIR

The basic system of LTIR is actually simple: When a team places a player on LTIR, a pool is created equal to their cap hit. The team can then recall players (subject to roster limits) and cover their cap hits out of that pool.

The net result is no more than 23 healthy players on the roster whose cap-hit total does not exceed the salary cap ceiling. For this reason, most people think of LTIR as just a removal of the injured player's cap hit from the cap calculation or as the creation of cap space. Most of the time that shorthand way of seeing things is fine.

If a player is permanently unfit to play, like Carey Price the famous San Jose Sharks goalie, or becomes unfit for the entire season including playoffs, like potentially Alex Pietrangelo, then the above system is exactly how things still work.

The tricky part is that the team has to decide when they assign the player to LTIR if they are out for the whole season plus playoffs and that has to be approved by the league and the NHLPA. If they aren't sure, they will need to use the in-season LTIR rules that are new.

In-Season LTIR

If a player is expected to return during the season, like Alex Barkov, for example, the pool created by his assignment to LTIR is equal to the lesser of his cap hit or the average NHL salary of the prior year. This number is approximately $3.82 million, and in the past has risen most years, save during the post-Covid flat cap period. This value will rise every year with the rising cap.

Other LTIR Rules

In all other aspects, the LTIR system remains unchanged. The Commissioner is free to question any assignment and to require independent medical confirmation as has always been the case.

When a player is getting healthy, they can be assigned to a special form of conditioning stint while remaining on LTIR, and there is no formal provision to force a team to activate a player immediately upon completion of the conditioning loan.

At the end of the regular season, when there are less than 24 days left, LTIR cannot be used.

Joe Woll

Woll is not injured or ill, but is on leave. There is a process by which he can be designated non-roster and he will not count against the roster limit, but he does count against the salary cap.

Clever Schemes

Cynicism reigns, and for many the assumption is that everyone is cheating and lying at all times. The fix is in, and it's all rigged. This view gives rise to the creation of clever schemes. The "loubar" jokes of years past, for example, get taken seriously and the suggestion is that players will collude with the team to fake injuries so some other player can get on the roster. You know, when you phrase it that way, it sounds pretty implausible.

It isn't very likely that someone will pretend to be injured so the team can play that prospect you like. And the idea the fully healthy and able players were routinely sitting out until the playoffs so their team could add at the deadline is actually pretty unlikely. Players not fully healthy and only somewhat able but nonetheless playing because it is the playoffs is a time-honoured tradition of the NHL, and that's the bigger explanation for the timing of player returns.

Anyone claiming Matthew Tkachuk was fully healthy last season in the playoffs is creating a conspiracy theory. Patrick Kane back in the day – well, that's a different shade of grey.

However, there is one sort of glaring bit of shenanigans with LTIR that is tolerated because it pretty much has to be. And that is the return to active play from LTIR at any time, not just the playoffs. There have been enough examples of players who are obviously in playing shape roaring through an AHL conditioning stint and then sitting on LTIR for days or even weeks more for us to realize the NHL knows and accepts this practice.

If you want to play gotcha games and rules lawyer the sport or be concerned with optics, you can make the case that it's cheating. I have raised an eyebrow in print in one extremely egregious case. But what teams are doing, most of the time, is trying to sort out tight cap situations to recall the player and maintain an effective roster. Last season, the Leafs sure appeared (optics!) to be resting Max Pacioretty on LTIR more than anything.

The function of roster limits, the salary cap, the new playoff cap, and the LTIR rules is not to create a speed trap the NHL can use to flash the blue lights and hand out a ticket, and it's not to maintain some naïve style of fairness. It's part of the system to make the teams reasonably equal in strength, increase the chances that most teams could plausibly make the playoffs deeper into the season and therefore sell more tickets, merchandise and TV contracts.

On the other side of the equation the NHLPA wants players who can play in the NHL to be in the NHL and to be as safe as is plausible, but also not to have their personal freedom of choice about the physical risks they take impeded unnecessarily. This is why both the league and the PA have to sign off on designating a player out for the full season.

No system is perfect, and there are actual lawyers who will parse the rules down to their true meaning and utilize them – look at the deferred contract cleverness that got what actually was a loophole in the CBA closed. LTIR functions as intended most of the time because the goal is not to punish teams for having injuries. We'll see if these new rules end up doing that in the playoffs, but until then, it pays to remember a team can only actually dress 18 skaters at a time, so limiting the replacements for an injured player isn't contrary to the balance of interests between the NHL and the PA.