Have any burning questions about the NHL’s CBA, salary cap, or any sort of transaction? Ask away.
We’re opening up questions for the second edition of our Salary Cap/Transactions FAQ, which we ran for the first time back in August. Now that we’re in-season, it’s a good time to clear up any confusion or uncertainty regarding the rationale behind some day-to-day moves or explain some larger concepts. Anything is fair game, although you can check out the first two editions of the FAQ to see if what you’re wondering about has already been answered.
Submit your questions in the comment section below, or contact us directly using this form. The next edition will run on Friday.
Has the league had any meaningful talks about some kind of cap equalization for differences in income tax in different territories? I’ve heard quite often that the reason many Canadian teams can’t get top talent is because the income taxes are higher, while Florida and Tennessee are popular destinations because the taxes are lower.
To me, it makes sense to modify the cap based on these numbers. IE, if income tax is 25% in Ontario, the salary cap ought to be 25% higher so the real pay given to players is equivalent.
With the CBA discussions beginning early next year, there was a report on the NHL app that many NHL players would be open to the NHL having a luxury cap of sorts to help grow the pay rate for players (which hasn’t actually grown in the last 20 years or so). Now, it didn’t get into detail exactly how that would work in the NHL & I don’t think it would be a blank check type of thing for teams like in MLB.
But maybe the NHL does do a luxury cap for teams to be able to go over a certain % of the salary cap as there are some teams that come to mind like Tampa, Vegas, New York (Rangers specifically), Boston, Florida & such that would be entirely willing to pay a luxury tax in order to bring in more top level talents to their roster. What are your thoughts on this luxury cap notion?
Thought I saw an article in which the Avs would be able to bank space but they are in LTIR. How is this possible, if it is.
As an aside, can you demonstrate how LTIR works?
(Actually, this isn’t pertinent to THIS topic, but I’d love to see a similar topic regarding advanced stats. Coming up a hockey fan in the 1960s, just getting people to pay attention to plus-minus and save percentage was a stretch. The blizzard of stats now makes it hard to figure out what’s what. What — for example — is the Corsi For of a superstar vs a 2nd liner? How important is zone starts as a measure? Which metrics — like, say, hockey-reference.com’s Defensive Point Shares — are pure snake oil? And so on.)
Great idea