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In a hard cap league, a rising salary cap upper limit floats all boats.
Now that the flat cap era is behind us, the business of hockey is about to change dramatically over the course of this offseason. Those changes will be felt in nearly every decision that NHL teams and players make in the weeks and months to come, but the shifting dynamic will be particularly keenly felt in the buyout market.
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A rise in the upper limit for next season, with significant, fixed lifts to the salary cap coming again over the next two offseasons as well, is going to fundamentally alter the logic of NHL buyouts.
Unlike in previous offseasons, the NHL system in an era of cap growth should theoretically be more forgiving for the NHL’s 32 member clubs. Buyouts are always a measure of last resort, and that last resort should fall even further down the standard decision-making tree for NHL club’s given that cap growth should both enhance the flexibility teams have to ride out past mistakes, while also making it easier to devise alternative solutions (such as trades), since every other team will have more flexibility as well.
We should see fewer buyouts going forward than we did the past several seasons, as the relentless austerity of the post-COVID flat cap era shaped NHL decision-making. The ability to buy out a standard player contract at a one-third or two-thirds cost, however, is still an arrow in every team’s cap management quiver, one that teams will still avail themselves of when it’s sensible to do so.
Here are nine potential 2025 buyouts that we’ll be tracking from the moment the first buyout window opens tomorrow until it closes on June 30. All salary and buyout data are courtesy of PuckPedia and CapWages.
The Dallas Stars are facing the tightest cap crunch in the NHL.
PuckPedia projects Dallas with $4.96 million of cap space, with only 16 players signed for next season (eight forwards, six defensemen, two goaltenders). The Stars have several key pending unrestricted free agents, including second-line center Matt Duchene (who led the club with 82 points in the regular season), franchise icon Jamie Benn, and productive rental Mikael Granlund. There’s also up-and-coming center Mavrik Bourque, who could be a tempting offer-sheet target for teams as an RFA.
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GM Jim Nill needs to move out at least one or two sizable contracts to free up cap flexibility. That mission to shed money should start with Matt Dumba, who has one year remaining at a $3.75 million cap hit. Dumba, 30, was a solid top-four defenseman in his prime but has declined to the point where he’s borderline unplayable at the NHL level. He was the only defenseman on the Stars who had a negative five-on-five goal differential during the regular season, despite playing relatively sheltered third-pair minutes. It speaks volumes that he was healthy scratched for the entire playoffs, even early on when Miro Heiskanen was unavailable.
A buyout could be an attractive option if it proves challenging to shed Dumba’s contract via trade. Buying Dumba out would save the Stars $2.33 million next season, with a dead cap penalty of $1.16 million for the 2026-27 season.
Relative to our reasonable expectations for a flawed middle-six forward with a relatively unique profile, Pierre Engvall hasn’t performed poorly for the Islanders necessarily — even if his seven-year, $21 million contract is wildly inefficient for a depth contributor. What’s not debatable is that he’s certainly, and very publicly, failed to ingratiate himself with Islanders head coach Patrick Roy.
Engvall had some decent moments for the Islanders down the stretch. Now under new management, however, the Islanders could avail themselves of a relatively favorable buyout structure and grant Engvall a fresh start during this buyout window.
Engvall has no signing bonuses attached to his current contract, so his buyout structure is unusually clean. If the Islanders opted to exercise a buyout on his deal, the club would be on the hook for a $1 million cap hit through the year 2035.
The Red Wings have struggled mightily under Steve Yzerman to remodel their blue-line group. Mistakes have been made, and they have been costly.
Justin Holl is hardly the only example one could point to as evidence of the Red Wings’ missteps, but he’s the easiest of those missteps to expediently manage by exercising a buyout on the final year of his contract, which carries a $3.4 million cap hit for the 2025-26 campaign.
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Buying out Holl would give the Red Wings some roster flexibility in addition to an extra $2.2 million in cap space to work with this offseason. Because Holl’s deal carries no signing bonuses, the buyout cap hit on his contract would be relatively clean for Detroit to handle.
In Oct. 2022, the Sabres made a calculated but risky bet on Mattias Samuelsson’s potential. Buffalo inked Samuelsson, a 22-year-old with only 54 games of NHL experience at the time, to a seven-year, $30 million extension a full season before his entry-level contract was set to expire. The Sabres were confident that the 6-foot-4 defensive stopper would be a key part of the club’s top-four blue line.
That decision has backfired.
Samuelsson has been injury-prone, averaging just 52 games played over the last three seasons, and his play has significantly regressed. The Sabres controlled just 45 percent of scoring chances and surrendered 2.83 goals against per 60 during his five-on-five shifts this season. He has been frequently criticized for his lack of physicality as well.
Samuelsson is still under 26, so he’s in a unique position where the Sabres would only be on the hook for one-third of his remaining contract value, rather than the standard two-thirds in the event of a buyout. That results in some favorable math — a buyout would save the Sabres $3.57 million per year for the five remaining seasons on Samuelsson’s contract, which currently carries a $4.285 million AAV. At the end of that, Buffalo would be on the hook for a modest $714,286 cap penalty for five additional years, which is a pretty insignificant figure when you consider how high the salary cap will be by then.
Buying Samuelsson out seems like an attractive option if the Sabres don’t find any suitors for him on the trade market.
It’s unfortunate how rapidly TJ Brodie’s game has deteriorated. One of the most underrated shutdown defensemen in the league during his prime, Brodie’s play fell off a cliff during his final year with the Maple Leafs. In Chicago, the 35-year-old was a flat-out liability most nights, posting the second-worst Net Rating of all Blackhawks players this season. He was a healthy scratch for every Blackhawks game after March 1.
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There’s no room for Brodie on Chicago’s blue line next season, especially with Sam Rinzel and Artyom Levshunov’s impressive late-season cameos. The cap savings of a Brodie buyout are marginal, but doing so would open up a roster spot and allow the franchise to amicably part ways with a highly accomplished, respected veteran rather than unceremoniously burying him in the minors.
Mathieu Joseph’s inaugural season with the Blues was a major disappointment. He was acquired last offseason from the cap-strapped Senators, billed as a solid two-way top-nine winger who could move up and down the lineup, chip in with valuable secondary offense (35 points in 72 games in 2023-24), and provide above-average defensive value.
Instead, Joseph was largely a non-factor all year. He slumped to just four goals and 10 assists in 60 games and was healthy scratched for four of the Blues’ seven games in the first round of the playoffs. The final year of Joseph’s contract, which carries a $2.95 million cap hit, is clearly a hindrance to the Blues’ books.
The merits of pulling the trigger on a Joseph buyout partially depend on how aggressive GM Doug Armstrong would like to be this summer. St. Louis currently has around $5 million in cap space, with nobody notable besides promising young goaltender Joel Hofer (RFA) requiring a new deal this summer. We can safely assume Torey Krug, who isn’t expected to play again after missing the entire 2024-25 season due to injury, will land on long-term injured reserve, which would bring the Blues’ spending power closer to $11.5 million this summer.
Armstrong may look at that as a sufficient amount of cap room, but if he’s plotting another bold, aggressive offseason, then perhaps he’d covet some extra flexibility to make splashes. A Joseph buyout would create $2.2 million of cap savings for next season at the expense of a $1.1 million cap penalty for 2026-27.
Evan Bouchard’s next contract is going to single-handedly eat up nearly all of the Oilers’ cap space this summer. Both Evolving-Hockey and AFP Analytics’ projections have Bouchard’s next deal clocking in around the $10.6-10.9 million range for eight years. Edmonton would only have $1-1.5 million left over after signing a Bouchard extension in that neighborhood.
In other words, the Oilers need to shed some money if they want to meaningfully address some of their weaknesses (goaltending and perhaps another bona fide top-six winger).
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Viktor Arvidsson, with one year remaining at a $4 million cap hit, stands out as one possible cap casualty. The 32-year-old has been a productive top-six forward for a long time, but proved to be a poor fit in Edmonton. He scored just 15 goals and 27 points in 67 games during the regular season despite being stapled to Leon Draisaitl’s wing for long stretches, and was in and out of the lineup during the playoffs.
In normal circumstances, Arvidsson’s contract would likely be tradeable, but the problem is that he owns a full no-movement clause. The Oilers’ first preference should be to work with him to find a suitable destination via trade, but if that proves too challenging, a buyout could be the last resort option.
An Arvidsson buyout would open up $2.66 million in cap space for next season, with a dead cap penalty of $1.33 million for 2026-27.
Philipp Grubauer struggled enormously for the Kraken this past season, as he has in most seasons since signing with the Kraken as an unrestricted free agent coming off being a Vezina finalist with the Avalanche. This season, however, his inability to provide a serviceable save percentage in relief appearances behind Joey Daccord, especially early in the year, proved enormously costly for a Kraken team that would’ve probably challenged for a wild-card spot late in the season with average goaltending in their non-Daccord starts.
Grubauer is entering the final year of his contract and has no signing bonuses in the deal. A buyout is a clean way for the Kraken to move on from what’s proven to be a formative error for the nascent franchise.
David Kämpf is clearly surplus to requirements for a Maple Leafs team that paid heavily to acquire Scott Laughton and upgrade their bottom-six center depth at the trade deadline, and only dressed Kämpf once during the playoffs.
Kämpf’s deal, however, has two years remaining on it. And the deal includes a signing bonus in both of those seasons, which isn’t subject to the two-thirds buyout calculation.
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As such, his deal isn’t a clean buyout candidate. The Maple Leafs, after all, would only net about $720,000 in total cap savings if they were to buy out Kämpf’s deal. That’s less cap savings than they’d net by simply burying him with the Toronto Marlies.
There are other, more probable and palatable solutions to this particular problem from a Maple Leafs perspective. One way or another, however, something has got to give.
(Top photo of Pierre Engvall: Jaylynn Nash / Getty Images)
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