Salary-cap crunch putting a tight squeeze on NHL teams already

On Thursday’s episode of "Daily Faceoff LIVE," Frank Seravalli and Tyler Yaremchuk discussed the salary cap crunch that’s already putting a tight squeeze on NHL teams.

Tyler Yaremchuk: Last night was also kind of a weird one around the league Frank and tonight will probably be more of the same with the amount of teams facing a tight cap crunch. With the Oilers and Canucks both dueling with eleven forwards and six defensemen. They were both a man short.

They’re not alone. It’s not like it’s just one or two teams who’ve mismanaged the cap and are now sitting there handcuffed. This is becoming a bit of a league-wide issue here Frank with the number of teams who can’t field full rosters for opening night.

Frank Seravalli: That shouldn’t be the case. Look a suspension is kind of one thing and the Kings were dealing with that in Kaliyev. You have some stuff that piles up, an untimely injury, for the Oilers, it was Niemeläinen that really kind of tripped them up in their planning because you can’t send him down.

All those things, most of them are unforeseen, but a few of them you can see, and the Ottawa Senators could have managed their cap better they didn’t necessarily need to sign Tarasenko to a $5M deal, and they didn’t necessarily need to re-sign Travis Hamonic, they didn’t need to have a buyout for Michael Del Zotto.

You can kind of work backward, and it’s a step-by-step process to peel back the layer on the onions but at the root of all of it is that for some of these contending teams, they are so close this year that they’re going to have to go with the bare minimum or one player under just to get through stretches of the season. That’s where we’re at in a fourth consecutive year of a flat salary cap.

My personal opinion: we didn’t need to be here this year. The NHLPA could have done a better job I think negotiating a change with the NHL. But, here we are and you’re starting to see how problematic that is when four teams on one night and two teams in the same game are squaring off with eleven forwards and six defensemen.

Tyler Yaremchuk: Berra chimes in on the Daily Faceoff YouTube chat and says, “The trade deadline is going to be interesting this year with the cap crunch.” Boy, if you thought last year was the year of the third-party broker, hello.

Frank Seravalli: Maybe, we’ll see.

You can watch the remainder of the episode here: