New Cap Could Pose a Threat to Teams?
Friday, July 04, 2008

Posted by Knuckles12

This might come as no surprise to anybody here, but I just thought I'd shed light on the subject, as I see it possibly becoming a big problem for teams in the next couple of years. This would be the increased inflation of the salary cap, as well as player's salaries.

The salary cap is currently set at $56.7 million dollars for the 08/09 season, a $6.4 million dollar increase from last season. Therein lies the problem, boys. The steady increase of the salary cap is good in a way, but also worries me. When teams start dishing out unheard of amounts of money like we've seen currently, with offers to Sundin from Vancouver for $10 million a season, it poses the question "what happens if the cap goes down"? Yes, especially with the US market suffering still, the Cap decreasing is also a possibility.

Take Pittsburgh for example. Names like Crosby, Malkin, Fleury and Staal come to mind. Think of the 4 of them, all with long term deals invested into Pittsburgh's system. Yes, that's a dynamite foundation for a team, but you are also looking at a shit load of money thrown at only 4 players. If the cap happend to decrease, they might screw themselves out of one or two of those key players that make up the face of the Penguins franchise.

On the other hand, there is always the possibility that by signing these young players to long term, high dollar deals, the team shuts themselves off to the rest of their players, or at least to a certain extent. Theoretically, it might not be uncommon for a team to experience roughly half the cap ($25-$30 million) could be taken up by 4 players, leaving not much room to do anything else with the team. This could start happening to many teams in the near future, especially the ones who suffered for 5+ years and are now reaping the benefits of multiple, excellent draft picks.

I might be spinning my tires on this whole subject, but I can foresee this being a problem soon for teams in the NHL. I guess you could look at it from the perspective that these players simply would be lost to free agency if they would be too expensive to resign, and thus go to lower placed teams who are looking to rebuild their franchise (Tampa is a good example this year). Regardless, I think the cap will bring about two things for the NHL and its teams, headaches for the GM's while trying to resign players and a higher amount of talent in each year's free agency pool.