Founder's Choice: The Dallas Stars' Salary Cap Outlook, from the 2026 Trade Deadline to 2028 and Beyond

Let's crack open the books, shall we?

Today, we’re featuring another Founder’s Choice story. Today’s piece was requested by Matt H.

Founding Members get to request an essay to be published on Stars Thoughts of at least 1,000 words on a topic of their choice, subject to approval. Per Matt’s request, we’re diving into the Stars’ salary cap situation over the next few seasons, which is going to be, uh, a ways over that 1,000-word mark. Sorry/you’re welcome, Matt.

If you would like to become a Founding Member, you can do so at starsthoughts.com/subscribe.

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The Dallas Stars will begin the final third of their season next week, but they’ve done enough good work so far that the players on the roster are largely less of a hot discussion topic than the ones who aren’t. Everyone wants to fantasize about what this Stars team could look like with one or two (or three) trades to bolster the group, but before you talk about what said acquisitions would cost, you have to make them work under the salary cap. Hence, the words you are reading right now.

For years, Nill has made it clear that he’s willing to help Stars teams gear up for the playoffs by making deals before the trade deadline. Those deals have varied in size, but nearly every Stars playoff team since 2013 has seen Jim Nill add something before the trade deadline.

This year, the Stars have a bit less flexibility (and fewer assets) than they have in the past. More than a few players are now locked into high-dollar, long-term contracts, and they’ve sent a lot of fungible assets out the door either for deadline pieces in past years, or in order to get some of the players now locked into said long-term contracts.

So that means filling out the edges of the roster is only going to get trickier in the coming seasons, starting with this trade deadline, right now.

So, as Matt has requested, we’re going to dive into precisely what cap space the Stars have to work with right now, this summer, and over the next couple of years—as well as what it would take to make more room, should they want to do so.

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Note 1: As usual, all numbers will be based on PuckPedia.

Note 2: For our purposes, we won’t be distinguishing between “salary cap space” and “temporary ability to exceed the salary cap as granted by LTIR.” There are some distinctions to be made there, but they likely won’t enter into our conversation, so we’ll skip ‘em, for now.

The Stars Trade Deadline Salary Cap Primer

Right now, the Dallas Stars have about $3.3 million in cap space to work with. That's not really enough room to add a Panarin-level salary without major surgery, but it is enough room to add a good player—especially if the other team retains some of said player’s cap hit to make the deal easier.

(Or, they could just sign Founding Member Matt H. as a free agent and pay him $3 million outright, but that seems pretty unlikely. Sorry, Matt.)

The maximum portion of a player’s cap hit a team can retain is 50%, and no third party can be involved at the deadline anymore to further reduce that figure (as happened with the Stars, Flames, and Devils back in 2024). Any retention has to happen just between the two teams involved in the trade when it happens.¹

So, for example: the Stars couldn’t add Evander Kane at full freight in exchange for just a draft pick, because his cap hit is currently $5.125 million, which is more than $3 million (source: Math). But if the Canucks retained 50% of that number, then the deal could happen.

That sort of retention is common in trades for expiring contracts, but it’s trickier when a player has multiple seasons remaining on their deal, e.g. Justin Faulk ($6.5 million for two years) or Blake Coleman ($4.9 million for two years). Teams don’t like to cede cap space in future seasons when they could, theoretically, be more competitive and want that cap space to use in making their team better.

Oh, it still happens, of course—Chicago retained a good chunk of Seth Jones’s salary for five seasons in the trade to Florida—but it’s tougher to do, and it costs a team more assets. And the Stars don’t have a lot of assets to begin with.

So, back to this year: Dallas has $3.3 million in space as it stands now, but this is going to change almost immediately when the season resumes. That’s because they will almost assuredly be taking Lian Bichsel off Long-Term Injured Reserve (LTIR). And since the Stars already have a full 23-man roster as it stands now, they’ll need to clear a spot on it for Bichsel, which will mean (we guess) sending a player like Kyle Capobianco down to AHL Texas (after he clears waivers).

That alters the cap number just a tad, because Bichsel makes over $900K against the cap while Capobianco is one of a few veterans making the league minimum this year: $775K. So, once the Stars activate Bichsel and make a corresponding move with one of those veterans, they’ll have roughly $140K less in cap space, taking them down to about $3.12 million.

And this is where the Tyler Seguin situation comes into play.

The Tyler Seguin Situation

The Stars have to make a decision about whether Seguin can actually return from ACL surgery and play this year or not. And they have to decide soon, because it has huge implications for how much room they have to work with at the trade deadline. Because of a rule change implemented (early) under the new CBA, a team can’t do what the Stars did last year with Miro Heiskanen and keep a player on LTIR all season in order to open up more cap space, only to activate him in the playoffs, when the salary cap no longer applied.

This year, the salary cap does apply in the playoffs, and the new rules dictate that a team with a player on LTIR only gets a maximum of $3.8 million in salary cap relief to work with, unless they declare the player out for the entire season and playoffs (Season-Ending LTIR).

For Seguin, if I’m honest, it’s hard to see an athlete undergoing an ACL surgery in December and returning just 4-5 months later in playoff-ready shape. I don’t know of a single athlete that’s done it, in fact.

However, it’s not impossible, because we’re talking about Tyler Seguin here. And if the Stars sit down with Seguin (as has been reported they will be doing toward the end of the Olympic break) and determine that he will be able to return, then they’ll continue to have that $3.12 in cap space to work with until they re-activate him.

Interestingly, in that Seguin Returns Scenario, the Stars could still go out and acquire a player that would put them a bit over the cap even after Seguin returns. Per PuckPedia, “For each playoff game, the total cap hit of the dressed players must be under the cap ceiling for that season.”

So if they acquired a player who put them a couple million over the cap when Seguin comes back, they could still, theoretically, scratch some other roster players before the game that day—for example, if they acquired another defensemen, they could take Ilya Lyubushkin’s $3.25 million cap hit off the roster to balance it out. This is all hypothetical, of course.

However, if the Stars do determine that Seguin is done for this year, moving him to season-ending LTIR would open up just over $9.1 million in cap space to use this season. (Remember, $3.8 of Seguin’s $9.85 cap hit is already being taken into account, which is why putting him on SE-LTIR gives the Stars about $6 million more in space to work with.)

As we saw last year, Jim Nill didn’t let newfound cap space burn a hole in his pocket. So even with a reduced asset pool, I’d still expect the Stars to take a long, hard look at just what moves they could do with their level of flexibility, and make them.

A top-four RHD and a LW/RW still seem like the most obvious needs, but a lot of the players purportedly available have term remaining, which means the Stars would have to figure out the implications for future seasons, not just this one. And hey, great news: That’s what we’re doing today!

Trade Deadline Cap Summary: The Stars will have $3.1 million in cap room when Bichsel returns, but they could have over $9.1 million in space if Seguin is declared out for the season.

Okay, let’s move on to the summer.

The Stars’ 2026-27 Cap Situation

Projected Cap Space: $14.3 million²

2026 UFAs: Jamie Benn, Adam Erne, Nathan Bastian, Alex Petrovic, Kyle Capobianco

2026 RFAs: Mavrik Bourque, Jason Robertson, Nils Lundkvist

2026 Signed Players: 17 of 23 roster players (10 forwards, 5 defensemen, 2 goalies)

Hryckowian-Johnston-Rantanen
xxxx-Hintz-xxxx
Steel-Duchene-Seguin
Bäck-Faksa-Blackwell

Lindell-Heiskanen
Harley-Lyubushkin
Bichsel-xxxx

Oettinger
DeSmith

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First of all, a quick accounting note.

If you’re checking PuckPedia, you might notice that my cap projection figure for 2026 is $2.1 million lower than their $16.4 million number.

That’s because of two additional cap hits the Stars will have to deal with: A projected $2 million in Performance Bonus Overages, and an extra $100K due to a rising NHL minimum salary.

Wait, What Are Performance Bonus Overages?

Glad you asked! If a team finishes the season over the cap by virtue of using LTIR to exceed it, then they won’t have “room” to use in paying down any performance bonuses under that season’s cap (as they might have been able to do if they’d been accruing cap space all year).

In that case, performance bonuses roll over and are applied to the following season’s cap number for that team. In fact, that’s why the Stars’ cap for this year has an additional $368K in bonus overages—that’s the total earned by Logan Stankoven (before he was traded) and by Wyatt Johnston in 2024-25. And since the Stars finished last year well over the salary cap, those bonuses were applied to this year.

But for 2026, that rollover figure is almost certainly going to be a much bigger number.

The Stars have three players with potential bonuses to be earned this year: Lian Bichsel (up to $500K), Justin Hryckowian ($80K), and Jamie Benn (up to $3 million), for a potential bonus total of $3.58 million.

(For Bichsel and Hryckowian’s bonuses, you can read about how players on entry-level contracts [ELC] have bonuses calculated right here. Bichsel still has an outside chance at earning some of his bonus money even after missing time, but it’s going to be tough for him to do so.)

I’m not going to apply Bichsel or Hryckowian’s numbers for our purposes today, but the big number there is Jamie Benn’s $3 million in bonuses, which breaks down this way:

• $500K for each of 20, 30, 50, and 60 Games Played (up to $2 million in total)

• $500K if the Stars win three playoff rounds and he plays in half the playoff games

• $500K for a Stanley Cup win, if he plays in half the playoff games

With 35 games played to date, Jamie Benn could still reach 60, but only if he plays every single one of the Stars’ 25 games remaining. And given Benn’s historic durability (i.e. When his lungs aren’t collapsing and his face isn’t being broken, I still think that’s likely.

Is it more likely than the Stars’ winning a Conference final? I’m not sure, but for our purposes, I’m going to project Benn to hit $2 million of his bonuses. And since the Stars may once again end the season over the salary cap, as would almost certainly happen with Seguin on LTIR, that would reduce the Stars’ 2026 cap number by the same amount.

And yeah, what about the minimum salary thing? Am I getting a raise?

Well, if your name is Colin Blackwell or Oskar Bäck, then yes: You are getting a raise next year, even though you’re already signed to a deal.

That’s because no player can ever be making less than the NHL minimum salary. That’s good news for players like Blackwell ($775K) and Bäck ($825K), who will both be bumped up to the NHL’s new $850K minimum salary next season. And because the cap hit has to match that number, those two players’ combined raise of $100K ($25K Bäck, 75KK for Blackwell) will also decrease the Stars’ cap flexibility next season.

However, that is also bad news for people like Stars assistant GM Mark Janko, who now has a little less room to cap wrangle with.

So with just $14.3 million in projected cap space to work with, that makes re-signing RFAs like Robertson and Bourque already a bit of a squeeze. And with just 17 players signed to begin with, even those two players still wouldn’t even get Dallas to a full 20-man lineup

In other words, some surgery is going to be required even with a fairly good bargain of an extension for Jason Robertson. So, let’s take a moment to talk about…

The Jason Robertson Situation

Robertson recently changed his agent to Andy Scott, who represents Mikko Rantanen. And if there’s one thing I know about agents, it’s that they generally don’t want to be known as people who get their clients locked into great-value contracts for the hockey club. They’re looking to make money.

Thomas Harley is also represented by Andy Scott, and he will be making a bit over $10 million per year for a long time. Wyatt Johnston (likewise) is himself making $8.4 million per season as a 22-year-old.

From the outside, switching agents makes tons of sense for Robertson, given that his new rep has done a few of these deals with the Stars over the last year. The question is, what’s the number Robertson is looking for?

Robertson has one RFA year left before he becomes a UFA in 2027. In theory, the Stars can make him a qualifying offer of $9.3 million and wait for him to elect arbitration, then come to some kind of a deal after that. That’s exactly what Toronto did with his younger brother, Nick, last summer. Who, by the way, also changed agents along with Jason.

Toronto qualified Nick Robertson with a $919,000 offer, and the two sides eventually settled on a deal of about double that number: The eventual $1.825 million deal made Nick the final player to settle on a contract after electing arbitration, and it doesn’t sound like he’s interested in continuing to go that route in coming RFA years.

Okay, so let’s say the Stars were to get Jason Robertson signed to Mikko Rantanen’s cap hit of $12 million.

That would give them just $2.3 million remaining in 2026-27 cap space, with 18 players signed with two RFAs left to deal with—both of whom also have arbitration rights, by the way.

And even if the Stars signed Bourque for a very small raise in the neighborhood of his $997K qualifying offer (QO), that leaves them with just $1.3 million in cap space, which is just enough room for Nils Lundkvist’s own $1.25 million QO.

So in this pretty ideal (for Dallas) scenario, Dallas would just barely scrape their way to a bare-minimum, 20-man roster with like $500K in cap space. That does not seem likely to happen, nor prudent to plan on doing.

One thing is clear: You have to figure out the Jason Robertson situation before July 1, one way or the other.

If Andy Scott is dead-set on getting his client something like $13-$14 million in a long-term deal, then I think the Stars would have to seriously consider trading him.

But we say “consider,” because even at that number, some roster surgery could still be the answer here, just like it was in the summer of 2025, when Mason Marchment and Matt Dumba were traded away to make room with Johnston, Oettinger, and Rantanen’s deals all kicking in.

Sure, the Stars could move a player like Ilya Lyubushkin (making $3.25 million for one final year in 2026-27), but they certainly wouldn’t get much in return, and it might even cost something to move him (as it did with Dumba). And now you’re creating even more vacancies on your roster.

Clearing room is going to be tough, but Sam Steel (at $2.1 million for one year) is another piece you could move, though it only saves you about $1 million when you replace him with a league-minimum player. And how much worse does that move make your bottom-six? These are questions that you have to be able to answer before making the huge decisions, as a GM.

Oh, and before one of you ding-dongs asks, you almost certainly don’t buy out Tyler Seguin’s final contract year, because his contract has been pretty much buyout proof since the day he signed it.

Similarly, Seguin also has a full no-move clause, as does Matt Duchene. Those veterans will be here next year, barring unforeseen and radical developments. (What developments? I don’t know. That’s why they’re unforeseen.)

Still, Robertson is the type of player you sign and figure out how to fit in later, if it comes to that. But given how long the Stars have seen the summer of 2026 coming, I suspect they have about five different plans for how to pivot, once negotiations reach their conclusion.

This is why Jim Nill has been pretty vocal this year about the fact that the Stars are primarily looking for pending UFAs in trade. Taking on even more cap hits for next season would put them in a position of trying to negotiate a deal with Robertson that would put them over the salary cap the moment he signed it. That’s not the best way to get leverage, last time I checked my negotiating handbook.

Of course, if the Stars did trade Robertson, they should get a very good haul in exchange, as well as a lot of flexibility. But for one of the premier left wingers in the NHL, that’s no less than what a team ought to get, at minimum.

What flexibility can actually get you on the 2026 UFA market is underwhelming, to put it mildly, unless you think you can get a 30-year-old Darren Raddysh to spurn Tampa Bay without paying him exorbitantly (and you know that someone like Philly is going to do that instead).

Anyway, Nill’s track record tends to be much stronger when it comes to trades than signing free agents (with Joe Pavelski and Alex Radulov being notable exceptions). So if the Stars can’t keep Robertson, the idea of unleashing Jim Nill’s Trade Mode with cap space and more assets to play with is not the worst thing you have probably ever heard. (And if it is the worst thing you’ve ever heard, your life has been exceedingly comfortable.)

But I suspect the idea of trading Robertson in hopes of making further good trades is going to appeal to you in direct proportion to your skepticism about Jason Robertson’s ceiling right now, so we’ll move on.

2026-27 Cap Summary: The Stars will have $14.3 million in cap room, but signing Jason Robertson will take up nearly all of that, so they’ll probably have to clear room by moving someone—Robertson or others.

Okay, let’s touch on the 2027-28 outlook before we wrap this giant tome up.

The Stars’ 2027-28 Cap Situation (Two years from now)

Projected Cap Space: $44.7 million

2027 UFAs: Tyler Seguin, Ilya Lyubushkin, Sam Steel, Colin Blackwell, Casey DeSmith, Oskar Bäck, Jason Robertson

2027 RFAs: Lian Bichsel

2027 Signed Players: 10 of 23 roster players (6 forwards, 3 defensemen, 1 goalie)

Hryckowian-Johnston-Rantanen
xxxx-Hintz-xxxx
xxxx-Duchene-xxxx
xxxx-Faksa-xxxx

Lindell-Heiskanen
Harley-xxxx
xxxx-xxxx

Oettinger
xxxx

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This is the big unknown, right here. In 2027, the Stars will have the core locked up, but almost nothing else (again, depending on Robertson and the other RFAs). We’ll also have two years under Glen Gulutzan to look back on, assuming nothing crazy happens.

The $44 million sounds like a big number, but that is obviously going to be much less by the time we get here, either because of a Robertson extension or because of what else the Stars did with that cap space by now. Bichsel and Bourque, if they’re still around, would also be up for raises, barring long-term deals of their own.

Still, this is about where you’d hope the value of those other long-term extensions comes into play. The cap will be $113 million at this point, and a lot of comparable players to Johnston, Rantanen, Heiskanen, and Oettinger will be making a lot more than that. Whether that actually results in the Stars’ being able to spend their own cap space on assets other teams can’t afford is less certain, though. (The cap is going up for everybody, I am told.)

With Hintz and Rantanen both entering their 31-year-old seasons, the Stars’ Cup window will be in a very interesting place. Probably a couple of players from the farm will have made it to Dallas by this point, with Emil Hemming and Tristan Bertucci, being two potential names pushing for an NHL spot in training camp, if things have broken right for them.

On the RFA front, if Lian Bichsel has a great season in ‘26-27, that’s a good problem to have in negotiations. But I don’t believe Bichsel will have arbitration rights yet, so even that isn’t too much of a worry.

In all likelihood, the prior summer will have sorted out a lot of these projected vacancies ahead of time. But here are a couple of thoughts about the 2027 summer that I’ll just bullet out here for y’all to chew on:

• How good will the second year of Justin Hyrckowian’s $950K AAV extension look like, by this point? Probably very, I am guessing.

• As for goaltending, Remi Poirier and Arno Tiefensee will both be RFAs in 2027 (Poirier will have arb rights), so you’d hope one of them will be at least in the conversation to replace the departing Casey DeSmith. If not, the Stars will likely bring in another veteran, as they’ve done in recent years with Wedgewood and DeSmith.

• Jake Oettinger’s playoffs over the next two years will also tell Dallas a lot about what they might need in terms of a backup—reliable vet to push him, or promising youth to develop as a dedicated backup?

• If Emil Hemming has a great AHL season in 2026-27, he may well find a spot waiting for him in the NHL by this point.

• With Tyler Seguin’s $9.85 million dropping off the cap at this point, will he re-sign with Dallas for a low-salary, bonus-laden deal like Jamie Benn did in 2025? Seguin being 35 years old is a strange thought indeed, for those who’ve watched him play since his early years, but it does allow him to sign such deals.

• As for centers, Duchene will be 36 by this point, and Faksa 32. If Arttu Hyry or Artem Shlaine haven’t taken a step by 2026-27, then this ‘27-28 season would be the time, one would think.

• To that end, it wouldn’t surprise me to see Duchene move to wing full-time by this point in his career.

• Incidentally, Duchene’s contract also becomes much easier to buy out in 2027, should things not be where the Stars need them to be. Of course, Dallas will hope he’s still well worth his deal by this point, but that little bit of flexibility is noteworthy.

• Finally, this season will end with Heiskanen having one year left on his deal at $8.45 million per year before becoming a UFA in 2029. And I’m willing to bet that his deal will be the best bargain in the NHL by this point. (Brave, I know.)

2027-28 Cap Summary: The core will still be locked up, but a lot of the newfound cap space will have to be spent on filling in the many gaps around it—mostly at wing and RHD.

1. Technically, if 75 days have gone by, a third team could still retain more of a cap hit in a subsequent trade but this has yet to happen and doesn’t appear to be in play for any of the big names on the trade board this year, so we’re ignoring it for now.

2. Yes, we’re already factoring in the rising salary cap each year.