Calgary Flames (and Flyers and Devils) to receive cap relief for charged 2018 World Junior players on leave

Charges were formally announced against five members of Canada’s 2018 World Junior hockey team on Monday, connected to an alleged sexual assault in June 2018.

Four of the charged players, including the Calgary Flames’ Dillon Dube, remain on paid leave from NHL clubs. On Monday afternoon, TSN’s Darren Dreger reported that these clubs will receive cap relief for the absence of these players. (FlamesNation has also confirmed this with league sources.)

Generally-speaking, clubs with players away on personal leave don’t receive cap relief. The main reason is that personal leaves tend to be short-term, typically for things like family illnesses, funerals, the birth of children, or attending to other such matters of a personal nature. The general mechanism for cap relief under the CBA is the long-term injury reserve for players away due to injury or illness for at least 10 games or 24 days, which personal leave wouldn’t really qualify for. (And the general principle under the CBA for the salary cap has been “If a player is being paid, they count against the cap.”)

But this is obviously a unique circumstance, and so the NHL has decided to make an exception in this case. The teams receiving relief are the Flames (Dube), New Jersey Devils (Cal Foote & Michael McLeod) and Philadelphia Flyers (Carter Hart). Dube carries a $2.3 million cap hit for the remainder of this season.