Report: NHL salary cap on the rise for the 2018-19 season, who wins?
NHL Deputy Commissioner Bill Daly announced that he expects around a five million-dollar raise in the salary cap. This will bring the salary cap near $82,000,000, nearly doubling the last increase.
The salary cap rising is good news for the NHL. It means the league is bringing in more money and growing its revenue, thanks in large part to the success of the Vegas Golden Knights.
The increase in the salary cap means the offseason could get even more interesting.
Teams will have a little more money to spend on July 1, and the players couldn’t be more excited to hear the news. General managers will also be excited to hear that contract for the player they overpaid two seasons ago won’t look quite as bad.
Bill Daly says the current projection for the salary cap is around $80 million, up $5 million from this season; however the NHL still needs to negotiate the growth factor with the NHLPA later in June so there's no hard number quite yet.
— Pierre LeBrun (@PierreVLeBrun) May 28, 2018
One of the teams that this will help the most is the Chicago Blackhawks. With the current salary cap at $75,000,000, the Blackhawks only have $6,225,705 in cap space. The increase means that the contracts of Brent Seabrook, Duncan Keith and Patrick Kane will weigh them down a little less. This doesn’t mean the Blackhawks will be spending big this summer, but they do not need to make a panic trade and dump a player because of salary concerns. See also: the Artemi Panarin trade.
Another big winner of the cap raise will the Vegas Golden Knights. Yes, the team already playing for the Stanley Cup can get better next season. With projected cap space of $24,833,334 million before the raise, the Knights will have plenty of money to play with. When it comes to players the need to keep, they will need to give William Karlsson a major payday. Karlsson has more than earned it.
Next: Top 25 NHL free agents this offseason
From the league’s perspective, the continuous rise of the salary cap is good, but there is still a long way to go. The case can be made the players in the NBA are overpaid and the contracts like the $84,000,000 fully guaranteed for Kirk Cousins are crazy, but the NHL is so far behind. The MLB has no salary cap, so the spending is astronomical. Mike Trout has the highest salary in MLB at $33,250,000, but which one is the closest in the NHL? Patrick Kane with a $10,500,000 cap hit.