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Sports
How about a five-year salary cap
The NHL annual salary cap has destroyed a key aspect of the game—the manager’s strategy
By Kevin Potvin
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There is a strong case to be made in favour of the salary cap in the NHL from the fan’s point of view. With the third season of the post-lockout, new salary-capped NHL almost completed, an assessment of its effects on aspects of the game from the fan’s point of view can now be attempted.
The owners of teams achieved what they said they needed to, which is salary certainty. All 30 teams in the NHL were restricted to spending on players no more than $50.3 million this year. The cap is adjusted each year based on an average of all team’s revenues, and next year, the cap is expected to be a few million higher.
Players also achieved most of what they wanted as well, which is a constant portion of the total revenues gathered by the teams that employ them. If they collectively make the game more attractive to fans allowing for higher ticket and television broadcast revenues, they should, they argued during the lockout four years ago, benefit equally with the owners. The first cap for the 2005-2006 season was $39 million per team, and has risen, due to the game’s increasing popularity, by about 40% since then, correspondingly enriching the average player by 40%.
From the fan’s point of view, gone are the days when teams with significantly higher revenues due to being located in larger markets, like the New York Rangers and the Detroit Red Wings, could repeatedly entice away the highest paid stars developed by teams with less access to revenues, like the Carolina Hurricanes and the Anaheim Ducks. The result is that each team has an equal chance in terms of spending strategies to build a Stanley Cup winner, even though there never was clear evidence that higher spending on players lead to any greater on-ice success. But it is revealing to note that the two first salary cap-era Stanley Cup winners are both so-called small market teams—The Carolina Hurricanes and the Anaheim Ducks, while 11 of the 12 Cup winners prior to the salary cap-era were traditionally big market teams, like the Detroit Red Wings and New Jersey Devils. There is no question that the league is more competitive now.
But there have been negative effects of the salary cap as well. Because nearly all teams spend right up to just below the cap, they are unable to make trades with other teams unless the trade involves players with nearly equal contracts. As a result, the number of trades is down and, more importantly, the number of trades involving stars is way down. Suggested trades used to be the staple of armchair general managers at home, an aspect of fandom that has lost most of its meaning.
A bigger loss for the fan arises from the biggest gain, ironically. While it is true that the league is more competitive now and that any team could win the Cup in any year, this is a loss for the serious fan of the game, even while it may be a gain for the fair-weather fan who concentrates solely on their own city’s home team. While a big aspect of successful team management in the past involved scooping star players developed by less endowed teams, it wasn’t the only aspect of management, or even, in the case of the NHL at least, the most important aspect. Successful teams took years to build through clever drafting of in-coming youngsters to judicious trades for under-utilized players on other teams. A team manager with a liberal and trusting owner could largely ignore financial matters and build up a team of younger, lesser-paid players with an eye on developing a core culture around the team that would evolve into a champion, at much higher cost as the young players developed into veteran stars.
Now with both a mandated minimum that teams must spend on players (pegged at $16 million below the cap) and an unbreachable maximum, every team at every step of its development is bound to have the same number of the same quality of stars and the same number of the same quality of incoming and developing youngsters. The entire strategic element of the long-term game that provided for the serious fan much of their interest—the building up of a team over the course of half a decade—has been removed by the cap. The perennial question that in the pre-cap days enthralled serious fans—Would you trade away present veteran assets and a mediocre chance at the championship for a raft of new draft picks to build a more serious chance at the Cup five years down the road?—is no longer worth discussing because it’s no longer an available strategy. There is only one strategy for a general manager now, and for the serious fan who imagines himself to be a manager, and that is to try for a Cup each year with the same mediocre range of talent that every other team has. It never was an exciting strategy in the past, and it isn’t an exciting one now.
The solution is simple. When the collective bargaining agreement is open for re-negotiation following the next season, managers and players, as well as fans, should suggest a five-year cap. Instead of a roughly $60 million cap each year, team managers should be allowed to spend $300 million over the course of five years, allotting funds for player contracts within that time frame as they see fit. Some might stick to spending about $60 million a year, while some might think they have the ingredients necessary for a Cup run and spend much more in the first and second years out of the five year term, knowing they will be left much shorter in the later years, while still others may spend less for a few years to build up to a highly paid, high quality team in years four and five of the five-year term.
Within the five years, every team from big and small markets alike have an equal chance to build a Cup winner. But fans don’t necessarily need to feel that every team every year has an equal chance. The five-year cap brings back to hockey an important—some say the most important—element of strategy, the team manager and his ability to envision a championship team through careful building of parts and development of players.
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