I think the NHL has long term problems...

[KeithIsActuallyBad]

Players haven't adjusted to the new rules. Do you watch all the extra little hacks/wacks, and jersey and stick grabs that players do now that don't get called. Just on one rush the other night, Anderson should have been called 2 for holding and 2 for slashing, while Cernak would have gotten 2 for tripping. That is just one play. Players will always do little things like that, and if all of it gets called, it is one whistle after another which means the game has no flow at all. If you think players just magically stop doing all these extra little things you are sadly mistaken.

They do it now because the NHL laxed on their penalty calling. Game management and all that.

It doesn't matter if game management has always been there. Doesn't mean it should be.

 

[NHL Review]

Fine amount is irrelevant. There have been far more than 2 coaches openly complain about officiating, which is yet another thing not new about this. Coaches complain all the time about calls and missed calls.

They do, but didn’t see one single person outside of Bettman defend the officials or DoPS lately. And it was at least four publicly in Berube, Brind’Amour, Cassidy, Cooper all complained this season including after wins. Which doesn’t usually happen. And that’s not including a GM or an entire franchise. That post by the Rangers was one of the more shocking things I’ve ever seen

Personally I think it’s a bit careless to say “it’s fine it’s always been this way” on every single issue but that’s just me. It’s not accurate and complacency is not an excuse

 

[Oddbob]

They do, but didn’t see one single person outside of Bettman defend the officials or DoPS lately. And it was at least four publicly in Berube, Brind’Amour, Cassidy, Cooper all complained this season including after wins. Which doesn’t usually happen

Personally I think it’s a bit disingenuous to say “it’s fine it’s always been this way” on every single issue but that’s just me

I think every year there is a at least 5-7 public times a coach complained and this year being 26 games shorter having a few less doesn't mean that there is a penalty issue that is new to the sport.

 

[Captain97]

What state or province has 40% LOCAL tax rates? I live in NY and our state taxes are not even close to that. If it was such an advantage why haven't the best players bolted for these no-state tax states the first moment they could? Why didn't Ovechkin, Crosby, Malkin sign with the Stars, Lightning, Panthers as soon as they were UFA eligible? Secondly, these guys pay a jock-tax. So, when the Lightning play on the road against the Isles, Rangers, Sabres, they are paying NY state income taxes. When they play the Devils on the road, they pay NJ state income taxes.

5) Bad contracts? Should contracts not be guaranteed? Yeah, NHLPA might go for that. Should buy-outs not count against the Cap? Yeah, owners might go for that.

Regarding the the tax rate question, marginal rates in the top income bracket in Ontario and Quebec are 53% and 54% annually (federal and provincial combined)

That being said I think the tax rate issue is heavily overplayed as good accountants help them get around a large portion of this.

I think the actual difference after all the shenanigans comes down to be closer to a 10-15% difference which definitely matters isn't as wildly impactful as some people make it out to be. Everyone's city has other advantages sell those as well.

 

[NHL Review]

I think every year there is a at least 5-7 public times a coach complained and this year being 26 games shorter having a few less doesn't mean that there is a penalty issue that is new to the sport.

Would like to hear it then, to that extent and in that scenario no. Would not say that

 

[Captain Awesome]

Show your math on this calculation, please. And remember that we're talking about state income tax (not federal income tax) differences, and that it's pro-rated based on where a player plays (so a player in Florida doesn't get the full benefit, for instance).

Can a player just start a corporation, locate it in Florida, and have their signing bonus paid out to that corporation and pay taxes on it there? I'm not sure how far the accountants go, but if people are doing stuff like that, then tax rates in different places are pretty largely irrelevant anyway. Maybe every player just gets paid out of Texas, Vegas, Florida, etc. for all we know and none of it is an issue. I don't know any sports accountants though, so I'm not sure what tricks they all use.

Of all the other things listed, reffing is a big issue. It's been a big issue since I started watching hockey. Having a different rulebook for the regular season and playoffs is stupid. Being inconsistent from game to game, week to week, season to season on how you call things is stupid. The first post lockout season that attempted to rectify this was a weird year, but if refs are consistent enough with calling everything they see, players and teams will adapt. The bottom line is, teams will get away with as much as they can wherever they can, and it usually results in lame clutch and grab hockey. If you need a nap, just put on some dead puck era hockey, it doesn't look hugely different from modern playoff hockey.

Also I love the hard cap, screw teams being able to outspend other teams, and I'm glad that bad contracts are penalized. Navigating the salary cap adds a layer of strategy to hockey that is much more intriguing than Colorado, Dallas, Detroit, and NJ spending their way to cups in the late 90's without competition. I'm a Stars fan saying this BTW. Also, non-guaranteed contracts are detrimental to players, the thing fans actually care about, and beneficial to billionaires who really, really don't need your sympathy or help.

If I can expand this topic to one more issue I have, it's 82 games. I think the reason the NFL is so brilliant on TV is that it's once a week per team, which makes it easy to watch for fans, and makes every game meaningful. I don't think the NHL could live on 17 games a year, which would be weird, but this shortened season was much more engaging because the games meant more individually than a regular season. 82 games is way too many games.

 

[maskingagent]

good points but for some of those reasons is why I no longer watch the regular season and only the playoffs.

 

[Mario_is_BACK!!]

Literally all comes down to officiating. Call the game the way it should be called, call every penalty. Either scoring and excitement goes up from all of the power plays or the players adjust, the game opens up and it's a lot more exciting.

 

[edog37]

First, congrats to the Lightning on their dominating Cup Win.

Some of my below points are highlighting a couple advantages that Tampa has enjoyed, but is no way sour grapes or an attack on the franchise. They played by the rules, good for them. My observations are strictly about the rules and how the league is run, so please save any calls about me being " a hater, or anti Tampa", no one wants to hear it.

Here is my list of things that should be of HUGE concern for the league:

1. The Reffing. It needs a complete overhaul and the league needs to decide what type of product they want to put on the ice. I submit, at present, it's an inconsistent mess. No one knows what a penalty is anymore, game management tactics and a total disconnect from regular season to playoffs. IF this isn't fixed soon, it's going to turn a lot of folks off the game.
2. Salary Cap. I personally believe it has some good points, but their needs to be a Luxury Tax or something for teams wanting to go for it and trying to win it all. Big markets are why this league stays afloat, they need the option to spend more.
3. Salary Cap. The tax advantage that multiple have over other higher taxed states or provinces have. To ignore this math is simply unfair. The same contract can be worth 40% more on some teams - yet ALL teams have the same amount to spend. It's utterly ridiculous.
4. Salary Cap. Yes, Tampa played by the rules. Yet, this was a bit of mockery when considering what they were able to dress come playoff time. Changes are needed.
5. Salary Cap. While protecting player dollars, teams need to have more option to get away from bad contracts. One bad signing can hamstring a team for a half decade. Is the game played in the boardroom or on the ice?
6. Goalie equipment. More need to be done on these rules/guidelines. The pic of Price/Vas shaking hands was comical, Price looks normal and Vas looks like the stay puff marshmallow man from Ghost Busters.
7. Size of nets. Despite being a traditionalist, I am coming around to the idea of making the nets a tiny bit bigger. Watching 1-0 Stanley Cup clinching games is NOT good for the future of hockey. I know some will disagree, but the entertainment value of that series was lackluster.
8. The case against the Black Hawks. I will just say that the league better get it right, with whatever they do. This simply cannot happen. Also, boo to Ron McLean for giving Bettman a pass and not evening asking him about it.

As a Canadian, who grew up watching and playing the game, to now having kids playing the game, if my interest as a hardcore fan is declining - I can't imagine the market is increasing.

FIX this sh*t now.

Reffing has always sucked & as always will. Nothing to see here.

Salary cap is fine & no to any luxury tax. The owners fought to impose a hard cap & any attempt to weaken it undermines that effort. The league as a whole is solvent, which is the main goal. If you don't like your team, then perhaps your team needs one &/or all of the following: better drafting, better player development/coaching, better free agent management. No one is guaranteed a Cup. I have no issue with Tampa's salary cap situation what so ever. They used the rules to their benefit just like every other team. This includes my Pens.

 

[MikeK]

The biggest issue I have with the game right now is with officiating and game management for artificial parity. A lot of the issues some have with the game today could be alleviated from better and more consistent officiating.

Picking and obstruction in many forms have crept their way back into the game all for the sake of game management and the appearance of parity. The NHL needs to stop this garbage now and allow skilled players to do what they should be doing best. Stop ignoring weaker teams who can't keep up and allow the stars to be stars.

The inconsistent and terrible officiating has really killed my interest in hockey.

 

[Pavels Dog]

Literally all comes down to officiating. Call the game the way it should be called, call every penalty. Either scoring and excitement goes up from all of the power plays or the players adjust, the game opens up and it's a lot more exciting.

Is it more exciting that way though?

Does anyone get "excited" from a player getting a 2 minute penalty because their stick lightly tapped the hand of another player?

Most people (probably in the 80-90% range or higher) think playoff hockey is better, more fun and more exciting than regular season hockey. Yet playoff hockey isn't called as tightly, there's more battling allowed and it's not just a special teams battle.

I'd hate for hockey to go the way of soccer, where any physical battle ends up with a foul and they never just let the players play. This also leads to more diving, more embellishing because it's easier to get the other player sent to the box.

Personally I don't think you can do much via officiating to get the game to "open up". Players are too big, too fast, too skilled. Teams are well coached and strong positionally. This isn't the 90s where d-men only survived because they could hack, slash and hold forwards as much as they wanted. Today's d-men are fast and mobile, even the bigger ones.
There just isn't much more space to open up. In fact the game could ironically open up more if you allowed more battles. The less "penalties" players want to risk committing, the more they will rely on positioning and hanging back in defensive position. This is what makes games static and closed and why playoffs are often a lot more fun to watch.

 

[txpd]

Oh geez. Rolling my eyes. The league has long term problems because of the salary cap.

 

[Gamimenos]

I'm on the fence about the salary cap issue with regards to taxation levels. People in the income bracket hockey players are have many many ways to reduce taxation, even in Canada. I don't think it's as much of an issue as it may be. In addition to this, I don't see a solution, with the salary players make, to make monetary adjustments to their cap hit without basically disclosing how much taxes they pay. I don't like this either as it feels kind of like a breach of privacy.

As for the reffing, it's fine if it's consistent. Getting Chris Lee style reffing in one game, and then nothing allowed the next is problematic for self-explanatory reasons. At the same time, you can't get fake parity without bias reffing. Is this the road the NHL wants to take? I'm not so sure.

 

[Mario_is_BACK!!]

Is it more exciting that way though?

Does anyone get "excited" from a player getting a 2 minute penalty because their stick lightly tapped the hand of another player?

Have you been in an arena for the chances created during a power play?

The answer is yes.

 

[Canadian Game]

Some good points by the OP. Although not all 1-0 games are boring. Personally, I thought last night’s game was the most entertaining complete game of the finals. Overall I wasn’t overly entertained by the series, but it was excellent from the third period of game 4 until Tampa Bay won.

In terms of goalie equipment, the NHL has defined sizes of pads, chest protectors, glove, and blockers for goalies. It’s been tweaked over and over again. It’s fine. While some games might be low scoring, there’s no shortage of games with 7+ goals either. Sometimes the lower scoring games can still be entertaining, and usually it involves excellent goaltending.

 

[North Cole]

Contrary the NHL has never been better. New TV deal, cap likely going to keep increasing once the world is back to a degree of normalcy. Southern Markets doing well.

The cap is doing it's job end of story. Of the four major stakeholders - Owners, Managers, Players, Fans - Only the fans get a perceived benefit from forcing playoff teams to be below the cap.

Owners - liability to players is minimal, there are no extra salaries beyond what was already set to be incurred. The playoff bonus pool is already determined and rosters are set to a specific size, so the payout is not dependent on cap.
Managers - Want to ice the best team possible, closing the loophole could hurt them in the future when they need it.
Players/NHLPA - More players drawing a salary, better for the union as a whole.
Fans - Mad that a team has a slight advantage in salary, which is technically open to all teams if they get lucky with the timing.

People like to complain about the reffing. NFL fans do it. NBA fans do it. Soccer fans do it. NHL fans do it. These sports aren't losing fans en masse because of it, and 99% of this community is going to significantly alter their viewership regardless of how much they complain about it. NHL has no incentive to change what appears to not be hurting them.

Changing the cap for Taxes is a disaster. Nobody here has any idea what a players total tax liability is, players could be saving tonnes of money through various tax sheltering vehicles or even through their signing bonuses. The NHL likely doesn't have the information they would need to approach this properly and I can't see the NHLPA wanting to freely give out their constituents tax information in order to adjust the cap.

Most of this, like all these threads, is much ado about nothing. Incessant complaining without even understanding how to actually fix any of these "issues", most of which aren't issues for the parties that have a real stake in them. That doesn't include fans by the way, sorry.

 

[blankall]

The reffing needs tweeking for sure.

A major fix needs to be made to the on ice cameras on the goal line. It's ridiculous that in the day of tiny HD cameras, all we get is a blurred overhead image or two. Tennis and football can show exactly where a ball at speed lands, but in hockey a puck trickling over the line cannot be tracked. Use a sensor. Put 100 cameras in each net. Do something about this now.

The goalie equipment should also be further reduced in size. No, I don't see Vasy's equipment as especially big though. He has a baby face, but he's a large person. In that picture of him shaking hands with Price, Vasy is standing closer to the camera. That's the reason why Vasy looks so tall in that image too.

 

[kabidjan18]

The league doesn't have "fake parity." In a defensive meta, games may be more competitively scored, but that doesn't mean that the teams are actually equal, and what has been borne out in recent years is that some teams are very consistently beaten by other teams or other styles of play. So they aren't artificially equal, they're just teams that are strictly worse in a defensive meta. And a defensive meta is much more interesting particularly for casual fans to watch, because casual fans may not track the game well but they can absolutely tell when a game is close and when it's a blowout on the scoreboard and they will tune in or tune out accordingly.

Also, with the evolution of high percentage hockey, anything that makes it easier to score one way also makes it easier to score another way, particularly if we're just talking dimensional changes. If you increase the size of the net or decrease the size of goaltender pads, you don't merely make it easier for players you like to score, you make it easier for deflections to find the back of the net, you give players jamming at rebounds more net to work with, you make it harder for a goalie to position himself against a point shot if he can't see the puck through a screen. High percentage offense will also increase with low percentage offense and eventually the same teams will win, teams like Tampa that can score with high percentage offense as much if not more than low percentage offense, and low percentage offense teams will still eventually lose.

 

[sh724]

Then make their salary cap based on net dollars the players takes home.

That would be damn near impossible to implement. Many players have income streams other than their NHL contract. There is also tax breaks for many many things that could be quite different from one player to the next.

There is a large difference between nominal tax rates (the percentage on the chart) and the effective tax rate (what is actually paid). Two people could have the exact same salary and one could be paying twice the taxes as the other

A player could start a "farm" (i use a farm for this example as its the easiest way to manipulate your taxes) and claim tens of thousands of losses every year, while not losing any actual money, thus lowering their taxable income significantly and therefore lowering their CAP hit

 

[Zamknij kurwa ryj]

Watching the NBA and NHL playoffs side by side, there really is no comparison. Yeah, the NHL needs to tweak some things, but it’s on a pretty good trajectory.

There really isn't.

One league has gotten it right and that league isn't the NHL. In terms of engagement, viewership, product the NBA shits all over the current-day NHL.

 

[Budz]

That would be damn near impossible to implement. Many players have income streams other than their NHL contract. There is also tax breaks for many many things that could be quite different from one player to the next.

There is a large difference between nominal tax rates (the percentage on the chart) and the effective tax rate (what is actually paid). Two people could have the exact same salary and one could be paying twice the taxes as the other

A player could start a "farm" (i use a farm for this example as its the easiest way to manipulate your taxes) and claim tens of thousands of losses every year, while not losing any actual money, thus lowering their taxable income significantly and therefore lowering their CAP hit

I’m sure there is an easy way to calculate each players take home strictly based on their contract.

 

[Soundwave]

I think the reffing is plainly becoming so bad that it's making a bit of a mockery of the sport. Refs are too gun shy to make calls because they don't want to be "involved in the game" but they are in a way selfishly kinda making themselves a bigger part of the story by not calling anything.

This is not just all opinion either, we can look at penalties called and there is a shocking drop in penalties called from 2015 onwards.

I think at minimum each team should be able to present one challenge egregious missed call that can be reviewed by "upstairs/Toronto/whatever" while play continues. If it's obviously a penalty the ref on ice missed, then it's reviewed for a few minutes and the team has the option to go on the PP if they get the greenlight but you can only do this once per game.

This would at least ease the "the other team is hooking/slash/grabbing all day long but the refs are letting them get away with it", well at least they could get penalized for 1 PP at minimum if that's their strategy.

 

[Nut Upstrom]

Four pages in and no one seems upset with how the league is handling the Chicago issue. I guess that must make league execs happy as hell: A team covers for a sex predator before looking the other way as he skips on over to a high school team and all the fans care about is state taxes and inconsistent officiating. I can practically hear Bettman and Wirtz exchanging high fives and giggling about how easy this story is going to be to bury.

 

[sh724]

No need to set a games played playoff eligibility for being able to play in the playoffs. Just carry over the salary cap to the post-season, makes zero sense to utilize it all regular season and then forget about it come playoff time.

They would have to rewrite the entire salary cap in order to do that. Cap calculations are fluid and can change every day. Teams are allowed to spend X amount per year on salaries it doesnt matter if they spend 90% of that in one month of the season and 10% the remainder of the season. Thats not really possible for them to do but hypothetically they could.

Its not uncommon for a teams "cap hits" to be greater than the salary cap post trade deadline during the regular season.

 

[sh724]

I’m sure there is an easy way to calculate each players take home strictly based on their contract.

The only way to calculate it would be to assume the max tax rate and apply it to a players max salary. But it would still be very nuanced due to jock taxes, home addresses, bonus/salary, etc. There is literally no easy way to do it that would actually make sense tax laws are far to complicated to come up with an "easy way". The NHL would have to hire a team of accountants just to calculated CAP hits