from Travis Yost of TSN,

The allocation question is a fascinating one because teams have different visions on how best to construct a Stanley Cup-calibre roster. Some organizations consistently run top-heavy payrolls that see superstars eat into huge portions of the available cap space. Other organizations, perhaps borne out of the necessity of not having superstar players available, prefer flatter spending across the board. Some teams will carve out large pieces of their cap space for their forward group – others, the same, but for defencemen or goaltending.

Now that it’s mid-August and most restricted free agent arbitration cases have resolved, we have a general sense of what each team’s cap position will be entering the 2018-19 season. As is the case every year, there’s a pretty significant divide in player payroll. Contending teams like St. Louis, Pittsburgh, and Washington have $1 million or less in cap space to work with. More fiscally conservative teams like New Jersey and Carolina have nearly $20 million in space. Then there are teams like Toronto that are flush with cap space (about $14 million today), but know full well that much of that will be utilized to retain future free agents like Auston Matthews, Mitch Marner, Jake Gardiner, and so on.

With this off-season wrapped up, I wanted to take a look at how teams decided to their cap space by position.

read on