Obviously given the nature of this website I’m predicting this will lean heavily to one answer, but I’m curious to see if there’s anyone on here who begrudgingly pays attention to the cap.

Personally, I love how it keeps teams on an even playing field and brings so much order to the league and team operations.

well we saw the difference in worth between the top team, Leafs at 2 billion, and bottom team, Yotes at 410 mil, so the salary cap evens it out, it's a good equalizer

Exactly. And big market teams have other ways of capitalizing on their wealth, like investing in overseas scouting, coaching, player development, etc...

Had a few discussion with people from gm game about expanding the cap further and adjusting it for taxes in different states/provinces to get every team on an equal playing field. higher taxes would = higher cap lower taxes = lower cap. in theory i think it could work in practice i dont know if it would.

The salary cap is a good thing, even better that it's a hard cap unlike the soft cap the other major sports have. The LTIR games are turning it into a soft cap, and I'm not liking that.

The salary cap is necessary

Without it 3 teams would basically dominate the NHL

Lets say the NHL gets rid of the cap. A team like Toronto who generated 2 billion last season would have a massive advantage over other organizations as they could say go to Giroux and sign him to a massive short term with massive bonuses.

According to @Sportico's calculations, the average @NHL team is worth $934 million, and the combined fair-market value of the NHL’s 32 clubs, including ownership’s stakes in real estate, regional sports networks and additional team-related holdings, is $30 billion. pic.twitter.com/PPfYZi3Cxc

— Sportico (@Sportico) October 14, 2021

So while its not perfect its better than nothing rn

The only solution I could think of is introducing something like a cushion of being 5% over the cap for healthy players in the playoffs. But then the issue becomes what about teams that accrued a bunch of cap space in the regular season? If a team like Ottawa was considerably under the cap for most of the season but then added a bunch at the deadline and had a daily cap hit of $89 million, they shouldn’t be punished because they saved that cap space.

Then you’d also have to exempt AHL call-ups from the salary cap, since NHL teams should have roster freedom in the playoffs.

So you’d probably have to make it so that the team’s average daily cap hit (not including any portion of the cap taken up by the player coming off LTIR) plus the player coming off of LTIR’s cap hit cannot exceed the salary cap (or more reasonably, 105% of the salary cap). Any players called up from the AHL or signed to ELCs after the end of the NHL season are exempt.

This wouldn’t affect pretty much any team in history other than last year’s Lightning. Which is really the only bad example of LTIR being an issue, especially because of Kucherov’s $9.5 million cap hit.

The other part of LTIR for retired players I don’t see as a problem at all. Especially since cap recapture penalties are stupid, and the only difference between LTIR and normal retirement is a slight inconvenience for the team and the players continuing to get paid.

I don’t like the salary cap but I understand why it’s in place

I like it a lot. It's a good way to keep parity in a sport. Without it, we'd just be stuck in a loop of the big teams winning everything (like baseball in most years)