Long-Winded Salary Cap Mythbusting: How the Stars' Cap Crunch Happened

It's time for some history

The Dallas Stars have about $10 million in cap space to use this summer. They have ten NHL forwards signed, along with seven defensemen and two goaltenders.

In most job markets, a budget of ten million smackeroos should be enough to add a couple more employees. The NHL is not most job markets, though. It’s a weird, fascinating place where the league’s revenue depends on huge money from Canadian markets while all the players get paid in US dollars, even if they’re in Winnipeg. Salaries are skyrocketing (by NHL standards, at least), and the league appears to be as healthy as ever while baseball is staring down the barrel of a work stoppage this winter.

In this weird but burgeoning market, ten million dollars just doesn’t buy what it used to. That’s especially true when one of the players involved is the best player at his position in the NHL. The Stars want to re-sign Jason Robertson and Mavrik Bourque, but they will need more than ten million dollars to do that, barring some kind of dark mind-control magic that is probably prohibited by the CBA (note to self: check on that).

We’ve talked about how the Stars can trade some current contracts away to make more space, and that still seems likely to happen. But today, I wanted to go back a bit further into the history of this team to look at how the Stars got so tight against the salary cap, and what (if anything) could have been done differently to avoid their current crunch.

I wound up going a little longer than planned—way longer, in fact. I think the audio version is like 40 minutes long, so I guess consider this a big ol’ treat for all you folks suppporting this site. Thank you for your continued support, as ever.

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Okay, let’s start by looking back at the oldest contract on the books, which is also their third-biggest contract as of this moment: Tyler Seguin’s final year of the $9.85 million eight-year extension he signed back in September of 2018.

Seguin’s extension kicked in the following summer in 2019, when he would start the year with the 14th-highest cap hit of any NHLer. Much like Jamie Benn’s contract, the Stars never really had a choice when it came to Seguin’s extension. Remember, this was a 26-year-old superstar center coming off a 40-goal season in which the Stars missed the playoffs. Despite some of the rumblings about John Tavares that summer, the Stars really didn’t have a viable alternative to bringing back Seguin, so locking him down was a must-do, and they must-did that as he entered his contract year.

No, Seguin didn’t exactly sign for a bargain. His was the tenth-highest AAV among forwards when the contract started in 2019, but it’s fair to say that for a team having missed the playoffs twice in a row, the Stars weren’t exactly in a position to ask Seguin to take pennies on the dollar to stay in Dallas. Given the $11 million Tavares wound up getting from his hometown Toronto in free agency, Seguin’s deal was probably as good as the Stars could have hoped to get at that time.