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Selling a cap to the PA will be easy in 2004, because the alternative will be either a long-term shutdown of the NHL or the immediate elimination of at least a third of the league's teams.

I've been compiling a list of things in my mind that are needed to "fix" the NHL, and putting together a long-term business plan that will allow teams to survive without engaging in annual fire sales of their best players is one of the key items. And a word of warning to the NHL here: Fans are going to disappear in a hurry if their teams undergo massive changes in personnel from one year to the next, regardless of whether those changes are driven by escalating salaries or by salary cap constraints. The NFL has not "settled down" in this regard -- what amazes me is that the league does not consider the large-scale player movement every post-season as an issue of concern. A team that drafts an All-Pro caliber player in 1996 and another one in 1997 should never reach a point where salary cap constraints require them to re-sign one or the other, but not both.

I hear the multi-teared system bandied about, that's just not going to fly in America. For one thing the owners spend WAY to much money on franchise fees . . .

Well, any owner that spends tens of millions of dollars on franchise fees for a team in a small market has nobody to blame but himself when the team starts running into financial trouble a few years later. There's no reason why an owner who made a bad financial decision ten years ago should be allowed to threaten a move to another city just because his market dried up. If that's all the NHL has become, why not just have four teams in Toronto, four in Montreal, a half-dozen in Chicago, ten in Detroit, and 35 more in New York?

The one positive aspect of these uncertain economic times is that sports teams are starting to get put in their places. Even in a large market like the New York City region, all the talk about new baseball stadiums (for the Yankees and Mets) and a new arena for the NHL's Devils and NBA's Nets has come to a crashing halt. These teams used to play the state governments of New York and New Jersey off against each other in an attempt to secure public financing for these venues, but now they've got no leverage at all because every level of government is broke.

Don't count on any union (PA's are just unions with silly names) being smart, just look at the goings on in the airline industry.

The NFL really has chilled, most of the players dumps that are using the cap as an excuse the owners are lieing. They're dumping players for the old pre-cap reasons but fans get irritated about those reasons so the owners make vague references to the cap and fans accept it at face value. Every player in the last 5 years that has been dumped to make "cap room" has been dumped because the people in charge of the team just didn't want them anymore. With deferred salary, signing bonuses, franchise players (some percentage of the franchise player's salary doesn't count to the cap, I forget how much) and incentive clauses the cap is very easy to work with, and it averages out to around 1.2 million per player anyway. The only way a team can't afford 2 all-pros is if they're pulling down around 20 mil against the cap, or they have a bunch of non-spectacular players being paid too much. And either of those can be solved by renegotiating with deferal and incentive bonuses.

But it's not just small market teams that suck. Look at the Rangers. If the NHL went tiered the Rangers would have to be on the chopping block. Florida Panthers are even worse and Miami is no small market. And yet the Minnesota Wild (hey, back to the original topic of the thread, I knew we could do it) knocked off a team with 3 times the salary. Bad management puts teams into a lower tier. Of course depending on how you manage the tier system you could have a Patrick vs Norris situation (remember how the Patrick was the only division that left 2 teams out of the playoffs even though it was the most competitive division, meanwhile the Norris regularly floated 2 sub-500 teams into the playoffs), either that or you have to completely ignore rivalries and they're really lucrative.

I'm not sure sports teams are being put in their place. One of the wierd things that's happened in the last 20 years is owners actually expect teams to be profitable. In the 70s one of the primary reasons to own a team was as a tax write-off, very few were profitable and that was just fine with owners that had other highly successful businesses and a Democratically controlled Congress lusting after their wallet. Sometime during the boom-boom 80s people decided that since every other industry in the world was profitable sports should be too. Maybe that's our big disconnect. The cliche is owners should be fans first and run the teams that way, fans SPEND money on sports we don't make money on it.