Previous scuttlebutt was that the salary cap would rise to around $87.7 million, but the NHL made it official on Saturday that it will actually go all the way up to $88 million. That’s a 5.39% increase from the 2023-24 season, making a lot of teams very happy after several years of little to no growth. Here are the official numbers for next season.

While it isn’t much, this is definitely good news for the Avalanche. Their summer is currently clouded by the Gabriel Landeskog and Valeri Nichushkin situations, but they could go about those situations multiple ways. Do they handle it like Vegas probably would and just sign players this summer and figure it out when one or both of those players are ready? Do they play it safe because they don’t want to get caught in a difficult situation where they have to dump players in a short period of time?

We won’t know their strategy for a few weeks and might never figure it out, but here is where the Avalanche currently stand, according to CapFriendly.

Signed NHL Forwards (8): Nathan MacKinnon, Mikko Rantanen, Gabriel Landeskog, Artturi Lehkonen, Ross Colton, Miles Wood, Logan O’Connor, and Nikolai Kovalenko.

Signed NHL Defensemen (4): Cale Makar, Devon Toews, Josh Manson, and Sam Girard.

Signed NHL Goaltenders (2): Alexandar Georgiev, Justus Annunen.

Obviously, a few things stand out right away. One, they’re counting on Landeskog being there. That’s far from a guarantee right now. They don’t list Valeri Nichushkin, who is suspended and won’t count against the salary cap until he’s reinstated. They’re also putting Kovalenko in there, which is probably a safe assumption.

Those 14 players put the Avalanche at $71,783,750 heading into the summer, giving them $16,216,250 in cap space. A large chunk of that cap space will go to Casey Mittelstadt, and I’m sure the Avalanche had an idea of what that extension would cost when they acquired him at the NHL Trade Deadline. My expectation is his new contract will run between $5-6 million per season, depending on how much term he gets. If it gets to $6 million, that gives the Avalanche a little over $10 million to fill out the rest of their roster, which would consist of at least five more players.