Quoting: wabit
The salary cap is a good thing, even better that it's a hard cap unlike the soft cap the other major sports have. The LTIR games are turning it into a soft cap, and I'm not liking that.
The only solution I could think of is introducing something like a cushion of being 5% over the cap for healthy players in the playoffs. But then the issue becomes what about teams that accrued a bunch of cap space in the regular season? If a team like Ottawa was considerably under the cap for most of the season but then added a bunch at the deadline and had a daily cap hit of $89 million, they shouldn’t be punished because they saved that cap space.
Then you’d also have to exempt AHL call-ups from the salary cap, since NHL teams should have roster freedom in the playoffs.
So you’d probably have to make it so that the team’s average daily cap hit (not including any portion of the cap taken up by the player coming off LTIR) plus the player coming off of LTIR’s cap hit cannot exceed the salary cap (or more reasonably, 105% of the salary cap). Any players called up from the AHL or signed to ELCs after the end of the NHL season are exempt.
This wouldn’t affect pretty much any team in history other than last year’s Lightning. Which is really the only bad example of LTIR being an issue, especially because of Kucherov’s $9.5 million cap hit.
The other part of LTIR for retired players I don’t see as a problem at all. Especially since cap recapture penalties are stupid, and the only difference between LTIR and normal retirement is a slight inconvenience for the team and the players continuing to get paid.