Toronto Maple Leafs: The Salary Cap is Hurting Hockey

The Toronto Maple Leafs have a bunch of good players. According to Twitter, however, that happens to be a bad thing.

The NHL salary cap and I are not on speaking terms right now.

I detest it, albeit not due to its inherent purpose. The salary cap was obviously erected with the intent to promote parity throughout the league and effectively level the financial playing field for non-traditional markets. And, in most respects, it has succeeded.

No, my derision lies primarily in the cap’s ability to be used as a conversation starter, where it gets moulded into an assembly line of easily churned out #Content.

Much like the piece you’re reading right now, in fact.

To illustrate this point, I’m going to talk about basketball, so bear with me here.

There are a number of reasons as to why the NBA routinely outpaces its North American league counterparts in regards to popularity growth year-by-year.

For one, basketball players are generally engaged in the act of playing for a greater percentage of the game’s runtime, providing superstars with ample opportunity to dominate on a nationally televised stage and earn victories in an almost singlehanded fashion. Those in other sports are not subject to this.

There’s also the fact that basketball uniforms consist only of a tank top and shorts. This matters, as small a detail as it may be. The face of LeBron James is infinitely more visible to audiences than, say, Sidney Crosby’s is and, when it comes down to it, visibility breeds marketability.

Furthermore, what is arguably the most active force driving the NBA’s recent success is their sense of individuality.

The decision to actively implement within the league a culture that not only condones but, in fact, promotes individual expression has allowed stars to dip their toes into the worlds of fashion and entertainment to great success while simultaneously working to cultivate storylines, both on and off the court, that draw fans back to their product week after week.

The NBA is the greatest reality show of all time. The NHL is if Downton Abby underwent a drama amputation.

And yet, I’d argue for the existence of another factor at play here – one equally, if not more so, influential to the league’s overall popularity; the soft cap.

At their respective cores, the soft cap system of the NBA succeeds in two vastly important areas where the NHL’s hard version fails spectacularly.

Talent Cultivation

Area number one is the luxury tax, also known to be the NBA’s golden goose of entertainment. For those who don’t know how this works, allow me to briefly explain.

The luxury tax is a CBA mechanism which allows general managers to exceed the salary cap. Sounds great, right? Well, the only catch is that the NBA applies a tax onto every dollar the team in question happens to spend in excess of the allotted cap and then forces them to submit a payment in equivalent to their excess, distributing that payment evenly among the rest of the league’s non-tax paying teams.

In operating under this model, the NBA simultaneously opts not to punish their richer teams by actively hampering their financial might and ensures that their smaller-market teams are not left victims as a result.

Everyone is happy and everyone gets paid.

The NHL’s hard cap offers no such flexibility. You’re either above the cap or below it. And if you, unfortunately, fall into the former category, the most likely outcome forces you to reluctantly jettison a promising young player and ultimately strip your roster of talent.

Now, you’d think the hard cap would be the system most conducive to player movement, right? Well, you’re wrong.

Thanks to the luxury tax, the NBA’s offseason is a never-ending cycle of entertainment. Stars move cities on a moment’s notice, joining forces with fellow stars in a bid to launch a full out assault for a championship because, if they’re willing to pay, teams are given the avenue to do this.

Doing so allows for the formation of one of sports’ most essential offerings; dynasties. Those which last the test of time. While parity is nice and all, the NHL currently suffers from a distinct lack of dynasties of their own and has ever since the 2004-05 lockout ended on an agreement for a hard cap.

Which brings me to the Maple Leafs, and area two.

Fan Enjoyment

As has been mentioned, a soft cap system declines to punish the rich or poor teams for their respective financial standing. Basketball sees its greatest success when their biggest assets thrive. It’s just logical. The NBA is a more exciting league on the whole when the Lakers, Celtics, Warriors, any big market organization fires on all cylinders.

It’s why LeBron going to Los Angeles was seen by the league office as a goldmine. Their most marketable star moved into their most lucrative market. It’s basically a licence to print money.

In the NHL, the hard cap actively works against this.

The Toronto Maple Leafs, like it or not, are hockey’s most iconic and profitable commodity (look up any ratings, profit, or media numbers to see proof) and, over the summer, signed a superstar of their own in John Tavares.

Only, rather than debating the on-ice implications of integrating this talent into their frighteningly lethal young core, the sole topic of discussion centred around how Tavares’ arrival dictated the departure of one of Toronto’s Big Four.

How, in any logical sense, is that good for the sport?

Ask any formerly-casual fan how they came upon their love of hockey, and they’ll almost certainly recount to you a tale of how they witnessed the Gretzky/Messier Oilers, or the Lemieux/Jagr Penguins, or the Mike Bossy/Denis Potvin Islanders in action and doing so ignited within them a passion for the game.

The hard cap has squashed that fantasy. It’s extinct now. Gone.

Leafs fans can’t act excited when Kasperi Kapanen scores his second short-handed breakaway goal of the game because they’ve instead become conditioned to be engulfed within the anxiety of his next cap hit.

The Tampa Bay Lightning bear the potential of becoming a true modern hockey dynasty but, oh no, their national media coverage centres almost solely around which piece they’ll inevitably be forced to sell off this summer in order to stay cap compliant.

Using the NBA’s luxury tax model – which is a bit skewed due to their larger cap – were the Leafs to spend roughly $10 million above the cap as a way of recouping their core, all 30 other NHL teams would receive $833,333 of Toronto’s excess payment.

Again, everyone gets paid, everyone stays happy.

The NBA, when all is said and done, allows their fans to simply enjoy their product in the manner of which it was intended. The NHL, however, does not, opting rather to capitalize on salary-related anxiety, the kind which can splinter a fanbase.

Even today, there is currently a civil war being waged on Twitter between the Leafs fans in support of William Nylander and those who see him as greedy cancer.

Keep in mind, we’re talking about fans of a team that, as of today, sit just a single point out of first place IN THE ENTIRE LEAGUE. And they’re eating eachother. Because the NHL has bred them to.

This is basically my way of saying: Let hockey fans enjoy hockey. 

I promise it won’t hurt.

Thanks for reading!