from Mark Sutcliffe of the Ottawa Citizen,

Last year, NHL teams spent 91.5 per cent of the total available cap room across the league. There’s no reason to believe they won’t spend at least that much this year.

If anything, they’ll likely spend more because the minimum payroll is rising at a faster rate than the ceiling. A few years ago, the league agreed to change the floor from a fixed percentage of the ceiling to exactly $16 million below the cap. The result is that teams who spend at the cap will increase their spending by nine per cent this year. Teams who spend at the floor will boost their payrolls by 12 per cent.

If the average team spends at 91.5 per cent of the cap this year, salaries will exceed $1.9 billion. Right now, just under $1.5 billion of cap space has been committed by the 30 teams. That means there’s $427 million still available to be spent on 149 roster spots still to be filled, an average of $2.9 million per player.

Given that some teams will fill out their rosters with a couple of rookies and two-way players making the league minimum, that leaves a lot of cash to spend on veterans.

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