Like I said, and like I explained in detail here 2 years ago, a soft cap which allows teams a Larry Bird like exception, an extremely stiff luxury tax, and a 54 or 55 or whatever pecent the league wanted celing on player salary league wide. This addresses my concern about teams being torn apart, provides much more revenue sharing money for the small markets, and provides cost certainty.
Ok. Lets start from the top. You can't have a "soft" cap, with a very stiff luxury tax. That basically makes it a hard cap. If the luxury tax is prohibitive to spending over the limit (say an exorbitantly high fee, or a steep penalty of picks) then that would limit just how soft the cap is. Either way, a soft cap (or one with any penalties) still allows teams who can make significantly higher profits pay over that range, and drive up the market for players. The difference in some of the top earning franchises and the bottom 10 or so is still wide enough where agreeing to any sort of soft cap at all would be very unlikely. When you have franchises who are losing money, they are not going to agree to allow other teams to spend like they have in the past. Even with penalties. Look at MLB. A few top teams still drive others out of profitability (with response to being able to field a competitive team). And hockey probably makes less in tv/tickets/etc in a lot of similar markets.
As far as a Larry Bird type rule, the Players association would've fought that tooth and nail. While on one point they might want to see their stars get paid, it does not help the rank and file member by limiting the salaries being able to be spread around. Similarly, the problems it would cause with players being stuck in a market they would not desire to be in would limit the effectiveness. Not to mention, those types of clauses are franchise killers more often they being helpful.
My other solution was that every cent generated by every team goes into a community account. At the end of the year, they divide it equally 30 ways. That would hurt my team more than most. But I'm the selfish one.
The problem is, no team would agree to this. You can't measure the funds of the franchises. If you look at the teams, they aren't a collective unit. They're basically individual companies that are paying a membership fee. To count their own revenue directly, and have to pool it would basically be impossible to get many owners to agree to. the only way you can realistically get something like this done, is pooling TV revenue, or advertising revenue. That runs into the problem that is at the base of much of this current CBA, there are no dollars for TV money (well, next to none). If the league had high revenue's to split for TV, they would worry less about who out earns someone else in their own markets.
Who knows what the PA would've accepted. The NHL never offered them anything but a hard cap. Yeah the PA handled the negotiations terribly too. Neither side should be absolved for their refusal consider anything different. To the PA's credit, they never once proposed to keep the old system. I don't recall any fans suggesting that either.
My problem with the cap is it has not, and will not, accomplish what we were told it would without meaningful revenue sharing. I don't blame the cap for the disparities, I blame the league for not addressing them.
the problem is, a hard cap was what the owners wanted. Anything else would just be playing into the pocket of the many.
Cost certainty and competitiveness is what will help keep the NHL around long term. If there is any avenue to allowing teams to just drive up the player contracts to amounts where everyone isn't on an even playing field, the sport will be hurt.
