MANALAPAN, Fla.— A hot-button issue for NHL fans doesn’t appear to be a pressing one for the league’s general managers, hence perceived abuse of long-term injured reserve replacement wasn’t even on the docket for their three-day meetings in Florida this week.

Which isn’t to say the topic wasn’t broached. NHL deputy commissioner Bill Daly confirmed it was discussed, “for maybe 90 seconds (on Sunday),” he said, referring to when he and commissioner Gary Bettman met with the executive committee (consisting of GMs Ken Holland of the Edmonton Oilers, Doug Armstrong of the St. Louis Blues, Kevin Cheveldayoff of the Winnipeg Jets, Steve Yzerman of the Detroit Red Wings, Don Waddell of the Carolina Hurricanes and Lou Lamoriello of the New York Islanders) and proposed they go back to their smaller groups of four-to-five GMs each to gauge whether or not there’s an appetite to address this in future collective bargaining negotiations.

“It wasn’t a formal item,” Daly said after the final meeting at the Eau Palm Beach Resort and Spa wrapped on Wednesday. “Even on the executive committee we didn’t have a formal agenda, so I threw out as a possible way for us to kind of talk about it. They undertook it to talk to their managers, and they’re going to come back to us.”

We canvassed several of them over the last few days, less than two weeks after certain GMs bought replacements for injured players who are slated to miss the regular season but could be back as early as Game 1 of the Stanley Cup Playoffs, and we only had one suggesting the league and Players’ Association should agree to amend the current agreement or fix the next one to prohibit teams from icing rosters that exceed the salary cap by even a penny for any game in the playoffs.

“I think for any game you play, you should have to be cap compliant,” said Dallas Stars GM Jim Nill. “Once you get to the playoffs, you should still have to be cap compliant. Say it’s 80 million and you’re at 90 because of LTI, you still have to be at 80 for what you put on the ice.”

As it stands right now, there are 17 teams in the NHL in LTI spending, with nine of those teams currently in a playoff position. And of those nine, seven of them could conceivably be exceeding a hypothetical playoff cap if their players were to return.

There are no guarantees they will, though.

Why this is even still a discussion is due to widespread skepticism among fans regarding how the reigning Stanley Cup champion Vegas Golden Knights maximized LTI replacement at this year’s trade deadline, adding Noah Hanifin and Tomas Hertl with Mark Stone joining Robin Lehner on the long-term injury list for a second consecutive season.

Stone suffered a lacerated spleen on Feb. 20 — an injury that, according to research, could take between eight and 10 weeks to recover from sufficiently to resume physical activity — and has been ruled out for the rest of the regular season. If he were to return for Game 1 of the playoffs, barring major adjustments to the lineup or other injuries, the Golden Knights could be icing a roster they’re paying considerably more than $83.5 million.

Despite Stone returning from back surgery in time for Game 1 of last year’s playoffs, Golden Knights general manager Kelly McCrimmon was quick to point out, “We weren’t over the cap for one game in last year’s playoffs, and we won the Stanley Cup.”

Minnesota Wild GM Bill Guerin believes even if they had been, it still would’ve been in line with the spirit of this exception originally written into the CBA 20 years ago.

He doesn’t have much appetite for change.

“You’ve gotta be careful what you wish for,” he told Sportsnet. “I think people from the outside think teams use it as a weapon, and I think you only use it when necessary because you’d rather have your player back. You don’t want him on LTI. I think if we do move forward and address it, we have to be really careful. To me, I’m fine with the way it is right now. I think teams that have done it have made good decisions in bad situations.

“They’ve been put in a bad position. If you look at Tampa, in 2021, when they were without (Nikita) Kucherov, he was out all year, and they still maintained a high level of play without their best player. I kind of felt like they earned replacing him. It’s not easy. We’ve been in LTI all year because Spurgeon’s out, we’ve had the ability to use that money. But it’s really tough to replace Jared Spurgeon. In Vegas and Mark Stone, it’s impossible to replace guys like that. You can supplement, but you can’t replace what they do for you.”

It’s not as if you get other players for free, either. You trade valuable futures for those players. You also face penalties for being as much as 10 per cent over the cap in the off-season and must be compliant by Day 1 of the following season.

And despite how fishy some people think it is that a player could miss a long period of time but could suddenly be healthy enough to play at the start of the playoffs, the league’s process in investigating the legitimacy of injuries for players placed on LTIR is rigorous.

Bettman said on Wednesday the NHL is “doing what we need to do to satisfy ourselves that these injuries have been bona fide for the period of time that LTI was applicable,” and Daly explained how.

“We have an independent, third-party physician review their medical records in detail,” he said, “and in-person examinations where necessary.”

All the GMs we spoke to at these meetings were far less skeptical about the league’s investigative capacity than they may have been two years ago, before the league reaffirmed its commitment to ferret out any potential circumvention.

“I don’t think there’s a loophole right now, because nobody’s breaking rules,” said Waddell. “You have injuries, you’re allowed to replace these players. I think it’s something that could potentially be looked at, but I’m fine with it.

“We lost Andrei Svechnikov last year after the deadline but couldn’t replace him. And if we had lost him ahead of the deadline, you owe it to your team and to your fans to be able to try to replace them.”

Nill wasn’t sure how supportive his colleagues would be about maintaining the cap through the playoffs.

“That’s my idea,” he said, “but I think some people have other ideas and we’ll see where it goes.”

One GM we spoke with, who requested anonymity, doesn’t believe it’ll go anywhere.

“There’s a precedent here, and it’s all within the rules and spirit of the provisions in a hard cap system,” he said. “We’re the only pro sports league that has a hard cap, and it’ll go up and up over the coming years and make this less of a discussion in the hockey world.

“It only ever is one around the deadline, anyway.”

As McCrimmon said, the replacement provision is one of several tools at a GM’s disposal to properly optimize the CBA for roster construction and preservation.

“General managers understand the collective bargaining agreement,” he said. “That’s what we’re supposed to do, and you do the best you can under those rules. Everyone in that room knows that. There’s different things teams do to best position themselves, and some of those things are out of circumstances beyond their control, some of them are retained transactions or teams signing players that are due bonuses the following year. These are mechanisms teams use to ice the best roster within the rules.”

His team would’ve benefited from Stone’s presence over the last month.

There are no guarantees he’ll be available to help the Golden Knights in the playoffs, but he could’ve had an impact on helping them avoid going 4-7-1 in the 12 games they’ve played since he went down. And if he had, he’d have given them a much plusher cushion than the uncomfortable three-point one they’re resting on ahead of the Wild for the last playoff spot in the Western Conference.

Holland, who’d be well within reason to be legitimately concerned the Golden Knights could make the playoffs and benefit from Stone’s return this spring to the Oilers’ expense, didn’t make much of a case to implement change to this stipulation in the CBA.

At least not to us.

“I think it’s probably a bigger deal to the media than it is at our level,” he said. “I can’t read the future. Like anything else, you watch, on a year-to-year basis, how things are running and, if there’s a concern down the road, that’s the appropriate time to do something. I think, for right now, everybody’s OK with where we’re at.”

The issue not even being tabled through more than 10 hours spent meeting spread over the past three days speaks to that.

Perhaps that changes in the near future, after the executive committee canvases their respective groups and reports back to the league.

But that’s not guaranteed, either.

“It wasn’t a topic of conversation here because it hasn’t been that big of an issue,” said Bettman. “The instances of LTI replacement leading into the playoffs is something that we monitor closely, and I think everybody’s satisfied, at least to this point, there hasn’t been game playing in that regard.

“The collective bargaining agreement was negotiated almost 20 years ago and there were certain provisions that were put in which at the time made sense and continue to make sense. If it were to be abused, that would obviously be something we’d want to address with the Players’ Association.”