We’ve had this conversation before and people think it will hurt teams so much. The parity we have now as someone said is mostly fake. It’s caused by limiting the big clubs from spending, making the smaller teams pay more and the shootout has made the races closer. If you took away the shootout games and ended them as ties things wouldn’t be as close. While on the ice things might close many teams are still losing money. Some sort of a luxury tax system would actually benefit smaller teams. The current revenue sharing system is a joke. Phoenix and NYI don’t get money cause of the tv markets they are in.

I’m with davebabychreturns. A hybrid system is the way to go if you were to do this. Have a soft cap of 57mil and let them to 72mil for example but tax the crap out of them as they go up. Heck even at $1 for every $1 a team at 72mil would actually be paying 87mil of actual money. If you only had 3 teams spending to 72mil and all the rest under the cap of 57mil that would be $45mil going to the struggling teams. So if you tax them even more and had more teams over the soft cap, which you would, that’s a lot of money helping out the Jackets, Panthers, Yotes, Isles and whoever. Also learn from the NBA and MLB and put restrictions in there. If you keep staying at the floor and not making any moves to try and compete after so many seasons you don’t get revenue sharing. Don’t let a team be the Pirates or Royals.

Does the NHL want as many at least somewhat healthy franchises as possible or parity on the ice at the cost of teams bleeding money? Teams were still losing money in the first couple seasons of the CBA when the cap was 39mil and 44mil respectively. So just lowering the cap isn’t going to save these teams.

There was parity before this CBA it just wasn’t shown in the regular season standings. 2003 WCF’s was the 6 and 7 seeds. 2004 Western Conf Champ was the 6 seeded Calgary Flames.

Now in saying all of that, it won’t happen because the big clubs don’t want to prop up the struggling clubs. Which is fricking funny considering they were all about adding those teams when they got the expansion fees.

As it is the NHL has basically achieved artificial parity, there are only about five teams in the league that are pretty much out of playoff contention by the trade deadline, even though it’s obvious that several others are going nowhere fast.

I’m not a fan of that and while it may keep some of the more gullible fans interested for another few weeks personally I think it detracts from some other interesting aspects of the game (the trade deadline for example).

Anyway, a luxury tax might be a means to establish meaningful revenue sharing in a way that the league has failed to do thusfar – frankly any scheme that allows the league to pocket and redistribute half (or more) of money teams are paying to sign a player should be given serious consideration.

Some hybrid scheme in which there was a lower hard cap and then the possibility to spend another $10-20m (at a steep “tax” rate) might be a good scheme. Say a $45m floor and a $55m “ceiling” where teams could pay $2 for every $1 of cap hit between $55-65m and $3 for every $1 between 65-75m.

Sure you would see loser franchises like the Islanders clinging to the floor $30m below some of their competitors but the difference would be that the teams $30m over the floor would be paying $30m into revenue sharing each year as well.

I’ll still put my money on the wealthier teams to make the playoffs 8 out of 10 times over the poorer teams and if you bet against me you will be homeless by the third go around.

The bottom line is that a luxury tax would fly directly in the face of Bettman’s “sunbelt” vision and so there is “zero” chance of that ever happening. Even as it is with the “so-called” parity right now, at least 4-6 x sunbelt teams are on “financial” life-support. If you start allowing already strong teams in traditional markets to get even stronger, then it’ll be “good-bye sunbelt, hello contraction” faster than Bettman could get that fly off of Daly’s bald head ! In all seriousness, there’s absolutely “no” way this happens.

Luxury tax is not logical at this stage, and only detracts from real-world solutions to the problem.

The ranger’s, wings, maple leafs, canadians, blackhawks and even the flyers will spend an extra 15 million dollars to go over the cap by 3 million. If they make it to the second round of the playoffs , two home playoff games will pay for that extra 15 million.

So, the richer team’s won’t even blink at a luxury tax. It will simply give them another loop hole to get around the cap system just as the lax wording regarding player’s yearly salary did within contracts.