Thanks to a COVID-19 outbreak that hit the Dallas Stars’ training camp, General Manager Jim Nill was forced to get creative with his team’s “opening night” roster. Making the team cap compliant was easy thanks to LTIR — it was maximizing their available cap space that proved difficult:
The Stars placed goaltender Ben Bishop ($4,916,667 cap hit) and defenseman Stephen Johns ($2,350,000) on LTIR before the season, allowing the team to exceed the salary cap by $7,266,667 on the roster the team submitted Tuesday to the NHL. But once the season began, any unused portion of that would go away, and the Stars would be left with $0 in cap space.