Is Spending Over the NHL Salary Cap Associated with Playoff Success? An Econometric Analysis of NHL Long-Term Injured Reserve Usage, 2015–2026

This study tests whether NHL teams that use Long-Term Injured Reserve (LTIR) to exceed the salary cap are associated with better playoff performance. Using eleven seasons of regular-season cap data and playoff results (2015–16 through 2025–26, excluding the 2019–20 COVID bubble), a linear regression was run with playoff win percentage as the outcome variable, LTIR overage in millions as the predictor, and regular-season points percentage as a control for the quality of each team.

The main finding is that every additional $1M of LTIR overage is associated with a 0.65 percentage point higher playoff win rate (p = 0.049 under conventional standard errors). Because individual teams appear more than once in the sample across different seasons, standard errors were also clustered by team; the association survives this correction and is tighter (p = 0.005). This study used only publicly available aggregate datasets, and no human subjects research approval was required.