What The Official 2019-20 NHL Salary Cap Means For The Flyers

The NHL has finally set the salary cap in stone for the 2019-20 season after a lengthy process.

Once the final pick of the 2019 NHL Entry Draft was made, the league, at long last, officialized the salary cap for the 2019-20 season. The new salary cap has been set at 81.5 million dollars, which is a two million dollar increase from last season, and a floor of 60.2 million. While this can be looked at as a good thing on paper, it was projected to be at 83 million back in December and losing a possible 1.5 million dollars can make a difference, especially to the Philadelphia Flyers.

The Flyers, at this moment, have 21,396,310 million dollars in space after the new cap was set, according to Cap Friendly. Now, this would be fine if they didn’t have six Restricted Free Agents (RFA), five of whom played essential roles on the team last season, that need contracts. Those players happen to be Ivan Provorov, Travis Konency, Travis Sanheim, Scott Laughton, Ryan Hartman, and to a lesser extent Justin Bailey. Bailey isn’t going to cost much at all, but the rest of the guys mentioned will get more than one million as an Average Annual Value (AAV). In Provorov’s case, Flyers site contributor Bill Meltzer speculated that the top pair Russian defenseman could receive a deal north of eight million per and also said Sanheim could get a five million AAV if it’s a long term contract, as well.

Putting that into perspective and applying Evolving Wild’s contract projections on AAV to Konecny, Laughton, and Hartman, the Flyers will have to allocate roughly 20.6 million of that 21.3 to those RFAs. I don’t think Hartman will get 2.5 million, so I’ll take away one million of that, giving Philadelphia 1.7 million dollars of cap space after all is said and done. General Manager Chuck Fletcher could decide to bridge Sanheim and or Konecny, which would help add more money to that total, but it’d be better to secure those talented, young players up for a long time. Keep in mind that the Flyers need to add a backup goaltender and could use a third line winger, too, which would leave the team even more strapped for cash. Fletcher didn’t rule out the possibility of a prospect taking that third line role, though, so that hole could be filled in-house.

Philadelphia was always going to be a little cap tight with any move Fletcher made, even if they were different from the Matt Niskanen and Justin Braun trades. Those two defensemen equate to 9.5 million dollars on the Flyers cap, so if Fletcher went and acquired a guy like P.K. Subban or Jacob Trouba instead of those two, the team would still be riding the line with Subban’s contract and what Trouba likely would ask for.

Unless some of the RFAs take team-friendly deals, which is possible, the Flyers are going to have a money issue. That extra 1.5 million would’ve been huge in keeping Philadelphia somewhat comfortably under the upper limit, and now, Fletcher may have to take some cost-cutting measures, whatever they may end up being.