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For hockey fans everywhere, more great For the fourth straight year, the NHL salary cap is going up.
After the NHL returned to play, following the lockout, in the 2005-06 season, the league had instituted a salary cap for the first time in history. While many of the players were dissatisfied, the owners won the battle and a salary cap of $39 million was created.
Since then, the salary cap has risen a whopping $17.7 million to $56.7 million in just four years. This year sees a $6.4 million increase from the last.
No doubt the change in rules, the addition of the shootout, and the league’s great young talent (Ovechkin, Crosby, Malkin, etc.) has played a huge role in drawing many new fans and recapturing old ones.
And whether you like it or not, for the NHL to take center stage in sports, teams like the Red Wings, Penguins, Capitals, and Rangers MUST return to the Stanley Cup Finals. Detroit and New York draw huge markets (and there are other teams as well) while Pittsburgh and Washington seem to have some of league’s best young talent.
But if all the marbles fall into place, it gives way for one of the worst commissioners in sports to possibly turn his legacy completely around.
As most of you know, Gary Bettman has sometimes performed worse than Mike Meyers The Love Guru did this past weekend.
While he may have had to put hockey on Versus for the first few years after the lockout, he certainly lost some brain cells in extending their contract for three more years.
Then there is his involvement in the sale of the Nashville Predators. Instead of letting Craig Leipold sell the Predators to Jim Balsillie, who would have most likely moved to team to Canada, Bettman intervened and directed Leipold towards William Del Biaggio III, a man who wanted to move the team to Kansas City.
Obviously Bettman paid no attention to this report from the Canadian Press:
31 percent of the League’s $1.1 billion worth of ticket sales* come via the six Canadian teams. Of the remaining twenty-four US teams, eleven either barely broke even and/or recorded losses last year. This, in markets Bettman insists are growing and self-sufficient.
Bettman’s vision of what the NHL should be is a great idea on paper, but reality is different. Teams scattered all across the United States sounds nice, but just isn't working, or at least in the cities that some teams currently call home.
There is no need to continue pointing out Bettman’s blunders because the point is that none of it will matter. If the right teams continue to flourish, the salary cap will continue to go up. Bettman will no doubt use the revenue as a means of stay as the commissioner.
Once the annual revenue of the league matches or is higher than the pre-lockout revenue, Bettman wanting to put teams in Kansas City, Las Vegas, and soon places like New Mexico and Wyoming will all be forgotten simply because he brought hockey back from the lockout.
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