Good players are going unsigned and some are even leaving the NHL. The flat cap is killing teams.

After the lockout, the NHL granted two compliance buyouts that didn't go against he cap. I think with another year of the flat cap, the NHL should have granted teams one of those types of buyouts. Those players still get paid and can sign for bargain contracts and teams can give the remaining NHL players jobs.

Flyers Would have had Gaudreau so I agree. Lol

The compliance buyouts were apart of the CBA when it was renegotiated; the circumstances during the pandemic were different.

After the 2013 lockout, there was the expectation that the cap would go up and revenues would continue to increase, so teams were fine with being able to have undesirable contracts on the books since the costs would be covered. This isn't the case now, considering the pandemic stagnated revenue growth in the NHL. Nearly every owner is a billionaire, and billionaires don't become billionaires by being generous, so they wouldn't have been so eager to have to be paying dead money during a recession.

Yes, that's obvious, but not the point I was making. Just because they're different circumstances doesn't mean relief isn't needed due to unmitigated circumstances. Players are leaving the NHL because teams can't afford them and that's not good for the NHL.

You'd have to convince the owners and the player's union to be okay with it which is a tall task.

Right and I'm saying they've made a mistake by not broaching this idea.

Bill Daley has said a CBO would only be on the table if the cap went down.

I do think that it should be available for teams, but at a cost. Structure it so the size of the buyout is pegged to draft picks. For instance,

$10m+ = two 1sts
$7-10m = one 1st, one 3rd
$5-7m = one 1st
$3m-5m= one 2nd, one 3rd
$1-3m = one 2nd
$0-1m = one 3rd

Would work a little like offersheet compensation. (Although someone would probably improve upon my comp brackets here). The picks would have to be surrendered in next draft. There would be no limit in the number of buyouts, but you would need the pick value to match, which would limit the overall contract amount exposed to buyouts (in other words, if player A is making $5.5m and gets CBO’ed, everyone else on that team making $5m+ would know they are safe from getting bought out).

any team that didn't use all the compliance buyouts last time should be able to use them now.