Changes could be coming to the NHL’s long-term injury reserve rules, but what those changes look like is unclear.
Deputy commissioner Bill Daly said that the majority of the NHL’s general managers “would like us to continue to consider making some kind of adjustment that would alleviate some of the concerns around that.”
LTIR is a mechanism that allows teams to exceed the salary cap when a player has an injury that requires them to miss at least 10 games and 24 days during the regular season. However, teams cannot activate a player from LTIR without having cap space for them.
At issue is how LTIR pertains to the playoffs. Since the salary cap does not cover playoff rosters, there have been several instances where a player returned from injury in time for Game 1 of the first round while his team made several other additions to the roster during his absence.
Daly said finding a solution to this issue is not as easy as just extending the cap into the playoffs because the NHL uses accrual accounting for player salaries.
“So you can pick up an expensive contract at the end of its term and your cap only gets charged a certain amount,” Daly explained. “But all of a sudden if that $1 million, say, you assume becomes $5 million on Game 1 of the playoffs and you can’t play that player as a result, I’m not sure that’s a fair result because teams complied within the rules.”
Daly said the league is still talking to the GMs about alternatives that it could present to the NHLPA. LTIR is a collectively bargained issue and cannot be changed without re-opening the CBA, which expires after the 2025-26 season.
“We’ve had preliminary talks with the players’ association just so they’re aware of the issue. They read about it, too,” Daly said. “And I don’t really know, quite frankly, what the players’ view of it is. So, it really would depend. I don’t know what the receptiveness would be to try and address it. And it probably depends on how complicated the fix is.”