No frenzy? Free agency an unknown given flat salary cap

After an easy decision atop the NHL draft, general manager Jeff Gorton doesn’t know what his New York Rangers or any team will do when free agency opens on Friday.

“I don’t think it’ll be like last year, that’s for sure,” Gorton said.

It won’t be like any year in the history of NHL free agency. For the first time since the salary cap was instituted in 2005, it will remain flat — at $81.5 million — from one season to the next because of revenues lost to the pandemic. That has left everyone in the dark about what the market will look like and howmuch players will make.

“There’s just not the dollars out there,” Toronto GM Kyle Dubas said Wednesday. “Certainly the agents, I think, that have a deep read of the market are preparing for the fact that this may not be free agency as usual.”

The league and players agreed to freeze the salary cap for at least next season, and executives are bracing for it to remain there for 2021-22. With less roomtomaneuver, this odd October market won’t provide the kind of payday a lot of free agents were hoping for.

Sure, the cream of the crop — defensemen Alex Pietrangelo and Torey Krug and winger Taylor Hall — are likely to get paid close to their pre-pandemic value. But there is a lot of uncertainty about the other talent available, fromwingermikehoffman to defenseman Tyson Barrie and goal

tender Braden Holtby.

“The top players are going to get theirmoney right away,” Dallas GM Jim Nill said. “I think after that, our league could be at a slow pace the next 4- 6 weeks. ... The next group of guys, I think teams are going to be patient.”

As Gorton pointed out, no one planned the past several years for COVID-19 contingencies, and now it’s a struggle to keep players under the cap, let alone spend in free agency.

“We projected in a world where the cap’s going up and growing every year, and now it’s not,” Columbus Gmjarmo Kekalainen said. “There’s a lot of teams in this league that will make hard decisions and lose a player that they really like just because they have to fit under the cap.”

So what about adding players? Usually, free agency is a frenzy when the clock hits noon on the East Coast and most of the top free agents are snapped up within hours.

Not so fast this year, in part because less money is available and also because the new collective bargaining agreement eliminated the pre-free agency interview period. Teams are not legally able to talk to agents about players until Friday.