Would NHL benefit from a soft cap instead of a hard one?

[Murky]

NBA has a soft cap and although it has it's flaws and it is confusing as f, there are some merits in the ideas behind it.

It is my understanding that the reason they went for a soft cap and the exceptions was to allow teams to retain their own players more easily. I think this is an excellent idea as such, although NBA has not been completely succesful with it.

I would like to go back a few decades when a player was often associated with a team and teams had more personality through their players. I also would like to keep the cap - and of course it is not going away, anyway so it has to be figured in.

I would really like to see players that have been with a team for a long time more easily retained. Something like for example - from top of my head - X% of AAV excluded from counting against the cap per a year served in the team starting from year Y, perhaps? A player that has been with a team for 10 years should be significantly easier to retain, to encourage teams keeping their own, instead of swapping players for marginal effect.

Or something along the lines that every 5 years a team can designate one of their own draft picks as not fully counting against the cap for the duration he spends with that team?

There are quite a few ways of making it work and I don't think the cap is so good at fostering parity in the league that these kinds of arrangements would upset it too much. Obviously the rich teams would benefit more and it may be that being a Habs fan makes me like the idea more.

But surely I am not the only fan wanting more stability on the player markets?

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[Barclay Donaldson]

This has been discussed before in the parity thread. All the soft cap does it make it so that teams with money can play by different rules than teams with less money. That is the definition of unfair. Hard cap makes it so that all teams have to play by the same rules, unless it's a Canadian team because they pay in American dollars and the exchange rate makes that unfair etc.

Keep the current cap rules since they work perfectly well now. Since it was introduced, there have been 26 combinations of teams in the finals and 19 different teams. That's pretty fair, especially considering that there was a run of 4 years when the cup switched between Chicago and Los Angeles. 13 years with 9 different winners is also extremely fair. Different teams in playoffs, gives everyone a chance. With all of the game 6s and 7s, any one of 12/13 different teams in playoffs could end up realistically winning the cup. There's realistically 25 teams that could make the playoffs. That's what makes the NHL fun. The NBA is not fun because everyone knows who is going to be in the semi-finals.

No team has a right to win because of money. That's what the soft cap does. It should be how that money is utilized. If you want the same players and same teams winning each year while rolling over everyone else in the league, apply the soft cap. If it were up to me, it should be kept far away from the NHL. Thank God the BOG agrees.

 

[sh724]

People seem to forget it was the wealthy teams that pushed for a hard cap not the poorer teams. The wealthy owners created an arms race and were feeling the effects. They wanted some level of cost certainty and decided on a hard cap.

A soft cap, or any other variation creates an uneven structure across the league thus eliminating the cost certainty the owners wanted.

If players wanted to be with the same team for their entire career they could do so by not trying to get as much as possible and take a discount. Which does happen on occasion but leads to the PA being unhappy because it sets the market for other players.

 

[Jets4Life]

People seem to forget it was the wealthy teams that pushed for a hard cap not the poorer teams. The wealthy owners created an arms race and were feeling the effects. They wanted some level of cost certainty and decided on a hard cap.

It was the small market clubs that were pursuing the hard cap.

 

[Playmaker09]

The NBA most certainly is not a league where star players play out their careers with one team, or even two.

 

[Tawnos]

People seem to forget it was the wealthy teams that pushed for a hard cap not the poorer teams. The wealthy owners created an arms race and were feeling the effects. They wanted some level of cost certainty and decided on a hard cap.

This is entirely untrue. The wealthy owners were happy to go along with it because it stood to get them more profits, but they weren't pushing for it. In fact, I seem to remember that several of the wealthy owners were pissed about the lost season.

 

[Ted Hoffman]

It is my understanding that the reason they went for a soft cap and the exceptions was to allow teams to retain their own players more easily. I think this is an excellent idea as such, although NBA has not been completely succesful with it.

It came about because a certain player from a certain very high-profile team was going to be unable to re-sign with that team because of a lack of cap space. Well, maybe someone will recall the player and team in question. It's a shame the guy is a total no-name.

I would like to go back a few decades when a player was often associated with a team and teams had more personality through their players.

I would like to go back to a time where the vast majority of social media didn't exist, reality TV shows weren't an avenue for has-been actors and performers to keep raking in money from demasses [who are dumbasses], and experts were rare and valued instead of minted courtesy of every stay at a Motel 6 and you can practically trip over a dozen in a trip to the supermarket.

I would really like to see players that have been with a team for a long time more easily retained. Something like for example - from top of my head - X% of AAV excluded from counting against the cap per a year served in the team starting from year Y, perhaps? A player that has been with a team for 10 years should be significantly easier to retain, to encourage teams keeping their own, instead of swapping players for marginal effect.

You do realize that for all the pain that the players are having with escrow, this will make it significantly worse - right? As has been noted 9,956 times previously: the NHLPA isn't going to go for a system where players are treated differently based on actions outside the player's control - and it makes zero sense for them to go for something that in all reality nets them nothing additional in aggregate while causing most players to forego even larger chunks of their salaries for the benefits of only a handful of guys. [Spoiler: as long as there's a prescribed split of revenues going to the players, you're not changing the size of the pie with any of these ideas - you're simply arguing over how to split the pie.]

Or something along the lines that every 5 years a team can designate one of their own draft picks as not fully counting against the cap for the duration he spends with that team?

See the above comment. It especially applies here, and it would be interpreted as a de facto franchise tag - something the players will fight tooth and nail.

There are quite a few ways of making it work and I don't think the cap is so good at fostering parity in the league that these kinds of arrangements would upset it too much. Obviously the rich teams would benefit more and it may be that being a Habs fan makes me like the idea more.

The competitive level of the league is fine right now. Only the fans of high-revenue teams want to go to a system that clearly benefits the high-revenue teams at the expense of everyone else.

But surely I am not the only fan wanting more stability on the player markets?

You do realize that players are much more likely to change teams because of trades, right? Movement in unrestricted free agency, while more frequent than in prior years, is still less frequent than in the pre-cap era. The vast majority of UFAs are changing teams because the prior team has little to no interest in bringing said player back at dollars the player is seeking; that has nothing to do with the cap and everything to do with teams trying to find value. If the player doesn't want to come back to a team, "we can keep you around and you'll count less against the cap" isn't getting anything to suddenly change their minds.

 

[mouser]

It was the small market clubs that were pursuing the hard cap.

It was a wide mix of owners. Not all of the biggest clubs were fully onboard with a salary cap, but many big market clubs were.

In hindsight teams like Toronto and the Rangers have to love the cap now. Their profits and franchise values sharply increased many multiples with the change.

 

[McRpro]

It's funny, as an Oilers fan my team would actually benefit from no cap because our owner is mega-rich. But it was painful watching the Oilers trade off star after star pre-Katz because they couldn't afford them. I would never want to go back to a system where teams like the Leafs and Rangers have 2 or 3x the payroll of the bottom teams. Where they can just buy up all the players like they used to. No thanks to that!

 

[Blackjack]

It was a wide mix of owners. Not all of the biggest clubs were fully onboard with a salary cap, but many big market clubs were.

In hindsight teams like Toronto and the Rangers have to love the cap now. Their profits and franchise values sharply increased many multiples with the change.

And they were able to ice stronger teams because, on balance, it's better to have limited dollars to spend on 26-27 year old UFAs than unlimited dollars to spend on 31 year old UFAs. Also, big market teams still have a big advantage over small market teams because of the ability to front-load contracts. The Rangers will pay Panarin and Trouba $49 million over the next two years.

 

[Murky]

Thanks for responses. I am under no illusion of cap changing to a soft one, I am merely interested in the discussion from purely a speculative point of view. I am also aware that NBA didn't really manage to keep players changing teams. Apparently I failed to communicate it in the OP. Again I am more interested in how it could be made to work - for example the rule(s) named after that one guy nobody remembers has rather obvious flaws written right into it, as far as player retention goes and they could be easily fixed.

As with everything - everything is a two edged sword. Hard cap certainly has it's merits. I am mostly interested in how people would make soft cap work as well as the opinions on if it would be, in their opinion, possibly better.

As with everything - everything can be viewed from several angles as well. For example some large market teams have seen their value sky rocket in the hard cap environment. The point of view of the discussion, I must admit, I did not really think through. I guess I was more interested in the topic as a fan, but as such I may have placed it in the wrong sub section of the forum.

While Habs are now more valuable - I as a fan am not too happy for reasons I do not think need much clarifying.

Also, I would like to go back in time when BB was young but, alas.