With just four teams in the postseason, the majority of NHL teams are preoccupied with their draft and free agency strategies. After the league recovered from losing money due to the pandemic, they will be getting ready for the first actual salary cap raise since 2018. The maximum limit will climb by 5% to $87.7 million for 2024–25 from $83.5 million in the current season.
The Montreal Canadiens are one of few clubs who will carry an overage into the next season as a result of exceeding the cap, thus they won’t fully benefit from the rise. When that occurs, the season’s performance incentives are added to a carryover penalty, and a number of young players receive bonuses included in their season
accumulate into a carryover penalty, and several young players hit bonuses built into their contracts. The total, with Juraj Slafkovský’s breakout responsible for a large portion of it, ended up at $1,022,500, or a little over one percent of next season’s cap.
The main culprit for this overextension of the cap in the past two years has been Carey Price’s contract. It doesn’t affect the team during the season as it essentially gets erased when placed on LTIR, but, as we see, there can be a disadvantage to doing so.
However, at this stage of the rebuild, that overage isn’t much of a concern for the Habs, and they’ve willingly taken on even more dead cap space to add to their draft capital. They received picks (or better ones) for retaining salary on Jeff Petry’s trade to the Detroit Red Wings before the season, and on Jake Allen’s contract when he was dealt to New Jersey at the deadline. Those retentions amount to about four-and-a-quarter million dollars.
As it is, even with Price’s contract included in the chart above, Montreal has about $7.4 million of space with only Arber Xhekaj and likely Justin Barron as the regulars in need of a new contract. When Xhekaj is signed, that will be two goaltenders, eight defencemen, and 13 forwards on a 23-man roster, which you have to think will be the alignment they run with given just how many NHL-calibre blue-liners are in the organization.
Even then, the defencemen will occupy less than a quarter of the new cap, and that includes Petry’s $2.3 million cap hit that actually has him as the third-highest paid member of the blue line. But that is going to change fairly quickly with Kaiden Guhle set for an extension and Lane Hutson already burning through a year of his three-year entry-level contract,
Slafkovský is the main player to keep in mind through the next few years of cap considerations. He will be the third member of the forward core signed long-term, and for reference, 
Nick Suzuki’s eight-year deal took up 9.5% of the 2022-23 cap, while Cole Caufield’s was worth 9.4% of 2023-24’s upper limit.
The salary cap was projected to rise to $92 million in 2025-26 back in 2022, but the recent move for the Arizona Coyotes to Utah, a shift from a home arena of 4,600 fans to 16,000 at Salt Lake City’s Delta Center may raise that number even further. At the original projection, a 9.4% cap hit would be $8.94 million, For that reason, Hughes will likely be trying to get a new deal done as soon as possible, with Julty 1 of this season being the earliest possible for a player entering the final year of a multi-year deal.
New extensions will eat up most of the new cap room becoming available. Any upgrades to the roster will be dependent on trades or active deals expiring to free up space. We’ll find out over the summer if Hughes plans to wait out the expiry of some of these contracts, or actively tries to swap them out for a player who fits better into the franchise’s long-term vision.
