Xanlet

And management decided to accept a multi-million dollar cap penalty for each of the next 7 years to go all in this year. See you guys in the 2030s.

Did you listen to the clip? He gives a direct example of Radulov $31.25m over 5 years and he will save $4.4m on that contract in Dallas that he would have had to pay in taxes if that same contract were signed in Montreal. That's MASSIVE money. That's a salary cap handicap.

Dallas and Florida have zero state income tax, which in reality translates to something like $10m extra cap space. If a team like Vancouver, which already has high local taxes, ALSO has dead cap, the team has a MASSIVE salary cap handicap. It's just extremely unlikely any success will come with that big of a disadvantage. NHL Players take taxes very seriously with contracts_VP8.webm

Next season is the only chance, but based on the recent record, it does not look like this team has the pieces, not to mention the team has traded away draft picks. Once again management has gone all in when the window really isn't open, and they've sacrificed the next 7 years to do it. And they just went all in 2 seasons ago sacrificing the future (which is now the present)! Gross mismanagement has basically ensured mediocrity for all of the 2020s. You can't constantly mortgage the future for the present, because they you are always struggling in the present because you mortgaged it in the past!

The team had Luongo's recapture penalty hampering their cap usage and just when the team was free from it they have OEL's buyout penalty for 8 more years. You can't compete in a league built for parity when you have cap penalties on top of high local income tax which causes players to demand over payment to ever sign here. The soonest window for the Canucks is 2031, assuming management doesn't add more albatrosses along the way. Zero point hoping for any success with this team in this decade.

This team won't be competitive now until the mid 2030s, great job management.

Management is determined by ownership, who will always care more about profit than hockey. Also, with the way the NHL is structured, there is profit sharing, which means it's directly in the interest of owners that the teams with weaker fan bases have an opportunity to grow their fan base. Vegas got a good team because it's in the owners' interest that they do well early and get a strong fan base going. This is why Canadian teams don't win championships, it's not in the financial interest of the owners for that to happen, so they structure everything in their power to rig it in a more financially desirable direction. Do people think the owner of the Canucks doesn't understand how the cap works? Do people think the owner doesn't realize that constantly trying to win now means they will never build a proper team that can win? Vancouver isn't meant to win. The Canucks are a money printing machine despite a 53 year history of losing. Certain other teams, on the other hand, are constantly at risk of bankruptcy unless they win championships, and lo and behold! Those are the teams that end up winning championships. (Pittsburgh has multiple bankruptcies in it's history and literally couldn't pay Lemieux which is why he become owner as part of the bankruptcy proceedings, Chicago was heading for bankruptcy before the Kane and Toews era and would be at risk again but have conveniently won the draft "lottery" and can draft a generational talent at 1st overall, something Vancouver has never had in 53 years). Once you look at the NHL through economic criteria, everything that happens makes way more sense. Always remember, the NHL is a for profit business enterprise. They have no allegiance to the spirit of the sport of to the integrity of hockey or any of that nonsense. They want money, and will only pay enough lip service to fairness to satisfy PR purposes, but not beyond that. Throw in this full push for sports gambling and it amounts to one of the biggest scam on Earth (even when Tim Peel is caught literally saying he stepped onto the ice intending to call a penalty against a specific team, people still put money on these games!). Friendly reminder though that the courts couldn't care less and throw everything back to the league to deal with (Dennis Wideman can end the career of an official, but the law will let the NHL handle it!).

You can't compete with a $7+m fringe defenseman on the books, so at the earliest 2027, unless, of course, management attempts to hurry this by sacrificing more assets to clear him from the books or takes on another albatross contract, if that happens then probably not until the 2030s

I've said it for years, if you financially support the team while they are in the basement, there is no incentive for ownership to improve the team. Take a look at many of the winning teams in the NHL (Pittsburgh and Chicago come to mine), they tend to be teams that go bankrupt or border on bankruptcy if they don't win championships regularly. This is a league wide problem, the very structure of the league itself is built to favor teams in certain locations (salary cap not taking income tax into account) to build fan bases and generate extra revenue in non-traditional market or weaker markets, whereas Canadian markets are permanent cash cows regardless of persistent failure and mediocrity.

As long as the cap does not take into account that income taxes are higher in BC than in Texas and Florida, we will always be in cap hell

Slumlord Enjoy permanent mediocrity for inflated prices.

Ah yes, let's keep mortgaging extra years of future cap space to try and be as good as possible right now.... even though it's a losing battle because we're constantly fighting against when we mortgaged the present in the past! Genius!

Other teams are allowed to circumvent the cap with impunity. Go look at that contract, front loaded with 4 years of $1m salary at the end. Guess how it ended? He never played those last 4 years because he magically became allergic to his equipment, taking his cap hit off the books too! Meanwhile Luongo retires too early and the league hammers Vancouver with a recapture penalty retroactively when they had originally approved the contract to begin with, AND he hadn't played in Vancouver for years!

The NHL has pretty strong profit sharing policies among owners. In fact, I think it's in Aquilini's interest for teams with typically weaker fan bases to make the playoffs and attract new fans because those profits make their way to him via the NHL's policy. In other words, the NHL takes Canuck's fans' money for granted, whereas certain other franchises need success to have fans pay money.

Teams in this league live or die by cap usage, that's it. For Vancouver, the cap brings two big issues, first being that since taxes are so high here versus places like Florida, Vancouver always has to overpay free agents, limiting the number of good players they can get under the cap. Second, for almost a decade now the team has had at least one atrocious contract or cap penalty (Loui, the Luongo recapture penalty, and now OEL). Let's face it, OEL is NO WHERE NEAR a $7m+ player, therefore his cap hit severely hurts the team's competitiveness. I'd say we just need to wait 4 years for OEL's contract to expire and then we can compete, but I thought that about the cap recapture penalty and LE's contract too, and this team seems to always find an albatross contract to hamper them permanently.