Dave Poulin: The NHL salary cap has never had a bigger impact on playoff races — Frederik Andersen and the Maple Leafs included

I had a long chat with Grant this week, and he voiced some concerns.

We’ve been best friends since Grade 9, and he’s been beside me every step of my hockey life. He came as close as you can to living life in the NHL without actually playing. He’s lived the game with me, he understands it well and he’s a big fan. A Maple Leafs fan.

He had a lot of questions about what’s happening right now with his favourite team, and why some of the roster decisions are being made.

Like many of you, Freddie Andersen is his favourite goalie. He wants him to play. Now. He feels he’s a huge piece of the puzzle, and believes he’ll be the guy who leads them on a great playoff run. As excited as everyone has been about Jack Campbell, Andersen is still the number one choice.

I explained why he’s simply not an option now, for two reasons.

The first is clear: He hasn’t been healthy. He hasn’t played in a game since March 19, and has just started to skate again. Yes, he’s been seen on the ice and has practised, but that’s not game ready.

Until he’s perfectly healthy, we won’t have to focus on the second reason: They may not have the salary-cap space to put Andersen back in the lineup. Essentially, in cap language, they may not be able to “afford” him. They overcharged the credit card. They spent part of Freddie’s money on someone else.

This won’t just apply to getting Freddie in the lineup, or just to the Leafs. Lineups over these last few weeks of the season may be very different than the ones we see the first day of the playoffs. As many as 17 teams have also been a little too aggressive with their wallets.

What will make Grant and every other hockey fan happy is that there is no salary cap in the playoffs. Teams just have to figure out how to get there.

The words (or better yet the acronym) no one wants to hear is LTIR: long-term injured reserve. Eyes glaze over when I even mention the salary cap, but never before has it been such a big factor for so many teams.

The LTIR mechanism is a simple one. If a player gets hurt during the regular season, you can use his money to replace him. Hard stop. That’s the intent, the purpose and why it was part of the original salary-cap agreement. In spirit, it works perfectly and makes total sense. Why should you be penalized because one of your players got hurt? Shouldn’t you be able to replace him?

In a pure sense, that’s exactly what should be allowed. That is, until really smart people learned how to use LTIR to their advantage. And that, of course, is what happened.

Remember when Patrick Kane got hurt in 2015 and everyone thought the Hawks were done? Instead, Chicago put Kane on LTIR and Stan Bowman used his money to pick up three key players at the trade deadline. Kane came back and starred in the playoffs, joining deadline pickups Antoine Vermette, Kimmo Timonen and Andrew Desjardins, and the Hawks won their third Stanley Cup in six years.

And if you think that was creative, wait until you see what’s happening down in Tampa Bay right now. They’re $18 million-plus (U.S.) over the cap, with a couple of guys named Nikita Kucherov and Steven Stamkos on LTIR and potentially ready to rejoin the Bolts come playoff time.

In a similar fashion to both Chicago in 2015 and Tampa Bay this season, the Leafs have pushed the system to the max. They have stretched the dollars well past the original limits. They overloaded at the trade deadline using money made available by having injured players such as Andersen on LTIR. The only problem for the ardent fan who wants to see everyone is that they’re not all available. Yet.

This time between the trade deadline and the final day of the regular season belongs to the coaches. Each day they learn who is available and decide how they will be employed. It’s a carousel that could include 26 to 28 players, though they don’t necessarily get to choose which ones on a given day. Injuries are also weighing heavily, including the versatile Zach Hyman and steady Zach Bogosian this past week.

Grant and his fellow fans will have to be patient. The remaining games won’t see all of their favourites in the lineup every night. The cap system, the injuries and the pure numbers won’t allow that. But once the playoffs start, it’s a new game.

Dave Poulin is a former NHL player, executive and TSN hockey analyst based in Toronto. He is a freelance contributing columnist for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @djpoulin20